Why would anyone need slow manual selection in the times of ubiquitous Internet with automated services for site promotion and with search engines penetrating every corner of human activity? Why would one need manual selection of sites in the times of plastic surgery and food with meat flavor? We, the editors of the Open Directory, believe that people have a right to get information on a topic of interest from all the available sites, not just from those that hired a SEO promoter. Because people have a right to know all viewpoints about a subject, not just one imposed by the most popular resource. Because experienced Internet users know how difficult it may be to find information on a particular issue, although a search engine offers a dozen pages of links for any request. Because only a human, not a search bot, can tell true values from sham ones, artful from artificial, a master from a charlatan, and sites with real content from those generated automatically.
The motto of the Open Directory "Humans do it better" has been relevant for 15 years and remains so.
What can you get from the Russian DMOZ branch today?
100,000 sites in Russian with concise descriptions of their contents without advertisement or unnatural keywords. These sites conform to the selection criteria and have been found valuable by an editor who is an expert on a certain subject. And they may contain different, sometimes opposite, points of view.
These make up about 14,000 categories, each devoted to a specific subject or geographic location, where one can find sites worth attention and make an informed choice not imposed by anyone.
Join us!
We aren't ideal yet. There are many valuable sites on the Internet that should be listed in DMOZ. They need to be evaluated, classified and described. Those sites already listed may change their owners or contents over time, so each DMOZ category needs periodic quality control. If you can help with this, consider becoming an editor. Take a subject that you know well or the region where you live and fill out the editor application form for the respective category. If your application gets approved - be sure that you will get unique experience and pleasure from involvement in a large open project.
About the Open Directory
The Open Directory Project (ODP), also known as DMOZ (Directory Mozilla), is the largest open directory of sites. The Russian language branch is currently the seventh largest by the quantity of listings. The number of active Russian-speaking editors is about 500. In total, about 5 million sites are listed in DMOZ in 89 languages, contributed by 99,500 editors. All the DMOZ editors participate as volunteers: no one, from a smallest category editor to a meta editor or an admin, receives any financial reward for their work in DMOZ.
The resulting data is available as XML licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License. ODP data is used by a number of sites and search engines. The Open Directory is owned by AOL.
In 2013, DMOZ celebrated its 15th anniversary.
Written by the World/Russian Volunteer Editors.
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