Forum Moderators: open
1. "This category needs an editor" means there isn't an editor in the categoryFalse.
If I edit Widgets and create two new subcategories Widgets/Musical and Widgets/Surgical, they will both read "This category needs an editor". It's not true. I'm the editor of both.
It's misleading, true. But there are no plans to change it.
2. If a category has an editor, it doesn't want another oneFalse.
Categories can and do have more than one editor. If you think you can contribute to a category, apply -- whether it has editors listed or not.
3. It is the Editor's job to find the right spot for my siteFalse.
It is an editor's role to list sites that deserve to be listed in the categories the editor edits. It is not their role to be experts on other categories.
If I submit to a wrong category then one of two things may happen:
First, the editor might pass it on to what they hope is a better category; and this may happen several times as the site is forwarded by non-experts in my field. Second, the editor (who is a non-expert in my field) may conclude that the submission is an affiliate or spam, and delete it. They may be wrong about that (in that if it had reached the right editor, it would have been accepted) but that's a risk I run in submitting to the wrong specialist. Either way, there will be delay in listing my site, and also a delay in listing other sites -- because of the time taken to correctly place my listing. I've chosen to waste a volunteer's time. And both me and the directory are worse off for that.
4. There are 1,000,000 unreviewed sitesFalse.
There may be 1,000,000 sites in the unreviewed queue but that doesn't mean someone hasn't looked at them. Unreviewed include:
Sites someone has reviewed, decided they are in the wrong category, and passed on to another category for further review. Sites that have been submitted prematurely -- ones under construction. Someone has reviewed them, and may recheck them every month or so. Sites that have 404ed after being listed. Some editors will pull these back into unreviewed for a month or so while trying to find the successor site. Eventually, they may be deleted. Sites that are under some active discussion about whether they are listable or not.
5. All I need to do is submit my siteFalse.
The ODP is a voluntary effort to build the best directory in the world. If your site is missing from it, then by all means submit it. But if other sites are also missing (such as your competitors) submit those too. That makes you an active volunteer with the same aim to improve the ODP as all the editors.
6. The ODP exists to help me sell thingsFalse.
The ODP exists to be (or become) the best human-edited directory. It wants to include websites that have unique content. If I don't have unique content, I don't belong in the ODP.
Any more myths out there?
Woaaah! Talk about shooting oneself on the foot! You are kidding right? :)
The only submission "normal" business owners do with respect to competitors is to submit them to [google.com...]
I do, I do!
The fact that I submit them to the <snip> should have no bearing on my good intentions ;)
And, in fact, DMOZ does have nearly 1,000,000 unreviewed. The fact that they have been moved or are parked or are 404 has no bearing on that. Actually a few month back it showed something like 1.12 million in the queue.
Whether they are "technically" unreviewed or not has little bearing on - someone still has to look at them.
<sigh>.. and I promised myself I would not get into another round of ODP bashing until at least April 2nd....
[edited by: NFFC at 8:18 pm (utc) on Feb. 24, 2003]
[edit reason] No adult terms [/edit]
Due to duplicate submissions, spam, and other inappropriate stuff, most unreviewed queues left alone for a while accumulate quite a high proportion of detreitus that can be quickly deleted when the time comes. In some areas the listable stuff is in the minority. It would make the editors job a lot easier if that stuff were never submitted in the first place.
Why? Simple - because without that editor their site might not get listed at all. It's better to be in the ODP fighting with the other listings than to be out. *
It's not too hard a concept if you realise that the editor has to act in a disinterested and impartial manner.
* there's another analogy to do with standing inside a tent too ;)
1. Yes some categories have editors who are hands on and keen, in other areas you can get whole countries without a single editor. OK it can be managed by higher, more etherial beings, but if you look at the "last edit" date for sub-cats you will find several months go by without an edit
2. I think more often than not, a new editor would not be accepted for a category with an existing editor, and would be advised to try a different category.
3. "the editor might pass it on to what they hope is a better category; and this may happen several times "
If editors do not know which category the site fits, then it is hardly surprising that the submitter is unsure.
4. There are 1,000,000 unreviewed sites however you may want to disguise it. Some unreviewed for a considerable length of time.
The ODP does a fine job in (trying to) indexing the web, it is manned by volunteers (often overlooked), but in the end it is probably because of its lack of "openess" that problems in expectation arise.
As always the "us" and "them" leads to both "sides" having different expectations
Yup, and that has been a problem since DMOZ got its' 3rd entry.
The directory was never planned - it just grew. And it grew in many directions, depending on who was in charge at the time. That is why you now have very similar sites legitimately listed in as many as a dozen categories.
It is not unusual at all for editors to create new categories that are already represented someplace else just to keep that site(s) under their control. And if two editors have categories for Widgets and each has several hundred or thousands of listings, neither is going to be happy about giving it up to merge with whatever is deemed to be the correct one.
You also have almost identical categories in such areas as business and science. There seems to be no rhyme or reason why one site is listed in one place or another.
>> If editors do not know which category the site fits, then it is hardly surprising that the submitter is unsure. <<
If someone submits Real Estate sites deep into the /Science branch (yeah, really they do that!), then I am not going to have (and don't want to have) a detailed knowledge of the /Business and /Shopping heirarchies; so it is going to get passed around quite a bit, or more likely just deleted as time-wasting.
Heck, you say {paraphased} "what hope is there for submitters if editors don't know the structure?" Hmm, you are looking at it from the wrong end. I already have hundreds of sites awaiting review, yours is no more important to me than the rest, however You have only one site to submit. The onus is on the submitter to get it close to right. See also [webmasterworld.com...]
>> It is not unusual at all for editors to create new categories that are already represented someplace else just to keep that site(s) under their control. <<
That would start looking like abuse to some. If there are related categories, the first step is to create @links and Related category links between them, so that it looks like one category is a subcategory of the other. In the longer term, once a pattern emerges, a complete reorganisation is carried out, often with a completely new category structure, with many categories maybe moving to a new branch, or merging with existing structures.
>> There seems to be no rhyme or reason why one site is listed in one place or another. <<
That is what the category charter is for. It explains what belongs in that category; and for categories that regularly suffer from wrongly placed submissions, also offers details of other places that those submissions should go. If these are unclear then they are eventually revised, often as part of a catgory reorganisaton.
[edited by: g1smd at 11:57 pm (utc) on Feb. 24, 2003]
8. There seems to be no rhyme or reason why one site is listed in one place or another.
Wrong thread. This thread is for myths. :)
1. "This category needs an editor" means there isn't an editor in the category.
2. If a category has an editor, it doesn't want another one.
3. It is the Editor's job to find the right spot for my site.
4. There are 1,000,000 unreviewed sites.
5. All I need to do is submit my site.
6. The ODP exists to help me sell things.
7. Staff will reply to your Email.
8. There seems to be no rhyme or reason why one site is listed in one place or another.
Unless it is obvious to me where a site should go, in a case like a grossly misplaced real estate site in an unrelated category, I just send 'em off to Test/Misplaced which presumably is manned by ODP taxonomy experts. While I at the moment edit a not insignificant branch of Health, to be honest I've never even looked at a single ODP real estate cat in my life. NEVER, not once. I don't have a clue how the real estate editors want to sort things out, and I'd rather leave it to them. In the same sense when it comes to anything in my Health/Addictions cat space, I am quite content if any other editor has a site that fits somewhere in there if they toss it my way at the top, and let me have to figure out which of the numerous subcats it belongs in. And, as you say if I see a real estate site submitted to a Alcoholics Anonymous cat, quite likely I may assume that it is part of a spam carpet bombing and delete it.
Would you admins and mods around here quit picking on us ODP editors. ;) Although, I've gotta admit that sometimes it seems that way. Because I am bored at the moment as an ODP editor with nothing to do (I have a newperm app in, but the metas still haven't got to it or are mulling it over), I have been checking over listed sites for guidelines compliance, and to see if they are properly listed. Because of a lack of category charters and the way other editors were approving sites, I found one case where I couldn't tell the difference based on the sites listed between a parent and some child cats. I handled this by actually writing reasonable charters for the cats, and moving the sites around to match the charters. So far no meta has mentioned anything about me rearranging things. However, I wonder if some site owner isn't going to send in a complaint I moved his site to a lower cat, because that cat has a lower Google PageRank. If they do, I hope that they lack the sense to mention why they are complaining has to do with Google PR. Metas don't care about Google SERPs.
LOL, it was changed last month to "Volunteer to edit this category"
Woaaah! Talk about shooting oneself on the foot! You are kidding right? :)
Absolutely not. The purpose of the OPD is to list all sites of relevance to a user searching for information. You are either actively assisting that process or you are hindering it. That perhaps outlines the fundamental gap in understanding between those who see ODP editor as barriers to helping them to sell things, and the editors themselves.
WindSun
The fact that I submit them to the <snip> should have no bearing on my good intentions ;)
This is an even extremer position that Vibgyor's. Actions like are worse that simply hindering the efforts of editors. It's closer to sabotage.
Windsun, you seem happy to publicise the shortcomings of the ODP. So it'd help me to understand the extent to which you contribute to those shortcomings if you could research and report an accurate estimate of the number of hours of editor's time wasted each month by actions like the ones you openly admit to carrying out.
cornwall
4. There are 1,000,000 unreviewed sites however you may want to disguise it
G1SMD has already addressed this point. "Unreviewed" would be better named "unlisted".
In many cases I am doing the site owner a favor by leaving it in Unreviewed. If it's under construction (submission of which is against the DMOZ guidelines) or it had a server failure when Robzilla came around, leaving it in unreviewed is a service to the site owner. Removing those may help the numbers but they wouldn't help the directory.
Mike_Mackin
7. Staff will reply to your Email ;)
I can't speak for the staff: I'm an editor. But there's a wide belief that part of the role of an editor is to engage in dialog with and educate submitters. That's false.
If your submission meets the guidelines, an editor will list it. If you think they've unfairly denied it its rightful place, or have incompetently edited the description, or are taking too long: raise your case at resource-zone or contact a meta directly. There is no need for direct contact with the editor. Leave them to get on with editing; that way, everyone wins.
steveb
LOL, it was changed last month to "Volunteer to edit this category"
Good point. There's some genuine progress here.
Some categories have the new message (including ones with an editor -- perhaps ones that want extra editors). But many categories still have the old message -- including ones with editors.
In fact, my categories and their subcategories have a random sprinkling of the old and new message. I'll go find out how I get each message assigned and get them sorted.
So if you come across a "Volunteer" message, take it seriously. But all categories are fair game for an application provided you have the skills and time.
Over the last three years I have built a lot of sites. Very few of these have made it into DMOZ, allthough all have been submitted. They were all submitted to (admittedly, in my opinion) an appropriate cat. None were dupes and none had questionable content.
I used to get really upset and I used to try to email the editors. Never got a response.
Most of the sites I have worked on are doing well now. How?
Well... I started to think of ways to work around it. I gave up getting upset about DMOZ. I realised that it wasn't a paid service and that I shouldn't expect so much from DMOZ.
Now I submit a site once and then I get going on building up other links. I can't afford to wait for DMOZ to get their act together and I don't need them to.
They used to give that intitial boost a site needed to get it up to PR 4 or 5 - because who is going to exchange links to a PR 1 or 0 site... There are other ways to do this (txt only ads, content which people will want to link to etc). There is no need to think a site is a non-starter if it doesn't get into DMOZ.
I can afford to ignore them.
I used to get really upset and I used to try to email the editors. Never got a response.
That is in line with my experience.
To be fair to editors, I believe it is a "once bitten, twice shy" situation. In other words a new editor has responded to an email early in their career at Dmoz, then got bogged down in extended correspondence, possibly abusive from the submitter, and after that decides not to reply to any more emails
As you say they are under no obligation to reply. However what puzzles me is why "advice" given here from senior DMOZ editors is to email the editor, or some other editor further up the tree.
One feels aggrieved (rightly or wrongly) at a site waiting months (years ;)) for inclusion in DMOZ. To be encouraged to email an editor and get no reply is to add insult to injury!
So, the truth is - submitters do not read the guidelines ;), and the problem - ODP edtors have no time for category descriptions.
P.S. Who is ready to start spamming Yahoo! for three hundred bucks per attempt?
The longest I ever waited was about 10 weeks, and 2-4 weeks was much more common, even just before they went paid.
I know of sites that have been siting in ODP since 1999.
I believe, any editor can spot a not-listed submission dated 1999 in the ODP, so what is an answer? Just simple, - no interest to that site or it has an error and was unlisted, but it still have some chances.
P.S. Did you have time to check listings in Yahoo!? I see dozens of dead domains, empty descriptions and doorways.
8. There seems to be no rhyme or reason why one site is listed in one place or another.
If I may trot out yet another (*groan*) analogy, think of the ODP as a small town which very rapidly grew into a big city in a vast, wild country (the Internet). Ritzy suburbs and dangerous slums alike sprawl rapidly outwards far distant from the boundaries and traditional zones of the original village.
The ODP's growth is organic; it reflects the Internet rather than directing or defining it. The emergence of some redundancy is inevitable given differences of professional knowledge or of culture among the distributed volunteers; and the editing comunity takes considerable effort to identify and resolve overlaps and ambiguities. If the structure of the directory had been fixed four years ago, when the future of the Internet was symbolized by the Pets.com sock puppet and the world was going to be watching Boo.com over their AT&T or C&W broadband connection, the directory might be far less useful today than as has resulted from a somewhat anarcho-liberal development model.
That is why the ODP evolves, which is more than can be said for the Dewey Decimal System, which was never quite able to decide whether to group personal computing with geology or with ufology. After all, Washington, DC was a planned city; the results have been short of perfect :).
9. You can make a generalization about the entire ODP based on anecdotal experience.
With millions of sites in hundreds of thousands of categories overseen by thousands of editors in hundreds of countries speaking dozens of languages covering almost every known topic on the Internet, your mileage is going to vary. Seriously vary. Any questions about "averages"-- average time to listing, average category size, average number of unreviewed submissions, average ratio of bad listings, etc.-- is virtually meaningless across the directory, and largely meaningless even within deep and focused nodes.
The new message appears when a page regenerates. If you are an editor just do a null edit on the page and it will update
Very wrong. If you have an interest in a topic, and can find three sites that aren't listed there, we really don't care -- really may not even look to see -- if there are already one or even two editors. And if there are three editors, then they must not be active, or it wouldn't be that small a category, right?
When I joined, "Classical Composers" was under 40 sites, and "Hymns" were represented by maybe one site and no category. There were two possible attitudes: (1) Well, no room for help here or (2) Google has 600 Classical Composer listings, maybe we need a LOT of help. I still believe that there are _thousands_ of places where 10-listing categories could be built out into 50-100 good listings, plus dozens more in related categories scattered around the directory. And ... in this matter I think I am presenting the view of the metas in general.
>>3. "the editor might pass it on to what they hope is a better category; and this may happen several times "
If editors do not know which category the site fits, then it is hardly surprising that the submitter is unsure.
The editor and the submitter may have significantly different areas of expertise: especially if the site is submitted to a very irrelevant topic. A real estate agent ought to have the sense to figure out where the competition hangs their shingles, even if he doesn't have a clue about taxonomy in general. But if a real-estate agent submits a site to, say, "Small Business Marketing" (I am _not_ making this up!) there is no reason at all to suppose that the topical editor should know anything about either real estate or _local_ businesses.
Now, with any large taxonomy (Dewey Decimal System and Library of Congress systems are both roughly the same size as the ODP), many people won't be able to find the right category for most sites. That's OK: if you can't, we'll try to. And if you try but don't find exactly the right place, we'll thank you for trying, and still treat your submittal sympathetically.
The important point is that if you COULD find the right category, and you DON'T, you're potentially setting yourself up for months of waiting for an editor with the _same_ knowledge THAT YOU ALREADY HAVE, and (with several hundred thousand other sites to choose from) nothing better to do than review yours. And, all that time, giving up useful site visibility -- the kind of thing you'd pay Yahoo or Look$mart $25 a month for. In addition, you're working really hard to irritate the editor. Now, editors oughtn't to let that irritation affect how they treat a site. But they're human: and for a borderline site, a sympathetic editor may be the difference between a listing and a reputation as Son of Hormel.
Now, if a sloppy ODP submittal isn't the stupidest way of saving ten minutes' work that you ever tried, then you probably aren't bright enough to run your own business. But we still have hundreds of people a day make that foolish choice.
