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The organization should immediately institute a policy of requiring all sites affiliated with an editor to be submitted to a highly placed person to be reviewed. No editor should be allowed to deal with himself!
Allowing self-dealing is the kiss of death for any person in a position of power. To even do it indicates a lack of professional caution and a willingness to open ones self to attack.
Of course it would be interesting how many editors would join and how many would stay if they could not take care of themselves and their friends.
If a man has to tell you he is honest, count your fingers eveytime he shakes your hand!
I would think that for DMOZ to have credibility there would be a policy against self-dealing.
This would rule out some of the directory's most valuable editors. It is often webmasters of sites devoted to a given topic that have the greatest contribution to make to the directory due to their intimate insights on their subject of choice.
The organization should immediately institute a policy of requiring all sites affiliated with an editor to be submitted to a highly placed person to be reviewed.
It is already ODP policy that any editor applying for a category must disclose any website affiliations related to the subject.
Any editor found being dishonest in this matter or clearly abusing their privileges is supposedly shown the door in short order.
The following is an excerpt from ODP's Guidelines [dmoz.org] for applying to edit additional categories...
Your application will be denied, and you will risk reduction or loss of editing privileges, if you:
Demonstrate self-serving editing. (You have cooled your site, you are manipulating descriptions by deleting keywords from competition or keyword padding your own or an affiliate site to improve search ranking, or you are deleting good, valid and working URLs that belong to competitors). Create vanity categories to highlight your own website or serve your own interests. Mirror another portion of the directory because you don't have permission to edit there.
There is of course the consideration that the ODP exists in the online world and not the physical one, so confirming whether or not someone has dared to touch some site is not as simple as issuing a subpoena or search warrant to see whether he or she is affiliated with it.
Consider also that unethical editing is not merely someone unfairly promoting his or her business interests. An editor may not own or derive income from a site, but perhaps in her eyes it's the best site for The True Religion and she manipulates the keywords so that it appears first on any search for "snuggly kittens" or "raindrops on roses." Maybe an editor is an avowed libertarian and decides that he is morally obligated to delete any pro-socialism submissions he encounters. Neither would have been stopped by any affiliation disclosure requirement.
In fact, under the existing broad guidelines, we have removed not a few editors whose religious, political, or social biases or hatreds were distorting the directory. It is the spirit of the ODP guidelines [dmoz.org] and the social contract [dmoz.org] that is enforced, not merely rules. We don't require that editors be altruistic, merely philanthropic. So an editor who adds "his" site to a category, but in a way that makes it indistinguishable from any other listing, and who conscientiously handles other submissions, will do well. Someone else who does nothing but log in once a month and change the keywords in the description of one site is not likely to remain long once discovered.
CAN ANYONE HELP ME?
[edited by: Laisha at 5:19 am (utc) on Dec. 19, 2002]
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Milt
