hutcheson - 1:13 am on Jul 31, 2007 (gmt 0)

>>And, historically speaking, "industrial" categories have been over-represented in webmaster forums vis-a-vis volunteer editor concerns (you might, although I wouldn't, say they are under-represented in volunteer editor interests vis-a-vis the typical webmaster forum participant.
So it's not a matter of "too few" editors in the ODP in general. It's simply a matter of too few surfers interested in that particular topic.

>This particular site isn’t an “industrial” site – In fact it has articles on very big widgets ;-) that most American’s try to see on their tour of the UK, and many if not most people dream of owning at some point in their life.

>So to try and use FUD in this way to dismiss the failings of DMOZ is scraping the bottom of the barrel somewhat. :)

And, of course, compared to the ODP, the MARKETING industry is of all industries MOST over-represented in forums such as these.

>And the presence of spam is not necessarily an issue -- a topic may be intrinsically uninteresting, or it may be rendered boring by the presence of large volumes of spam. But remember, "uninteresting" or "interesting" are concepts defined by each editor

>If there were sufficient editors you would expect these inadequacies to be ironed out.

The silliness of this can be seen by turning it around. If there were "sufficient webmasters", would MY full range of interests be represented, or would we just see more spam? So far as I can see, it's clearly the latter.

Or, more abstractly, the apparent difference in interests between the cooperative volunteer communities and the professional marketers is not an artifact of sample size: it represents a genuine social divide.

>>The problem was not that there are no good suggestions. The problem is that there is no class of suggestors that can be procedurally "trusted"

>This shows a very closed mind approach. It isn’t about trusting anything implicitly or procedurally, its about establishing possible trust statistically by "grouping submissions from the same source to together”

Remember, it takes a certain number of data points to establish any statistical validity. You're assuming that there do exist single sources that provide enough submissions to establish trust. And there aren't. So it's not a matter of procedural limitations. If your mythical super-submitter existed, we could consider how we might spot him most efficiently. But it simply doesn't exist. So the greatest efficiency gains are by not wasting any resources looking for him.

>I have several interests so I looked at the categories for which I know the subjects inside out. These subjects are diverse; I could not realistically apply to be an editor for each of those sections of the tree. I could easily add 10 – 20 sites to several of those categories (Non of which I have any affiliation to or even have websites in those fields)

Not so. If you could add 10-20 sites to even one category, you'd have a track record for applying to a second category. If you chose the first two categories to be "close together" taxonomically, the next step might well be the "common parent category" -- and from there, perhaps a medium-sized category that wasn't so close, or a remote small category.

And, because effective editing in one focussed category will lead to large numbers of sites that belong in "the next category over" (or to deep-content sites that can be deeplinked around the tree); and because INSIDE site submissions which ARE tracked for reputation purpose, a good editor can easily build a reputation leading to high-level permissions, even if he only edits in fairly focussed areas. A typical editall might have only 20-30 category applications on his log.