Description updated

My listing is titled: GPS Zone
in category:

http://www.dmoz.com/Shopping/Consumer_Electronics/GPS_-_Global_Positioning_System/

I have updated my description twice and both times I had the word/letters "GPS" removed from my description because it appears in my title and is considered a repeat of the same word. I questioned this the first time because of the numerous other listings in the category that had "GPS" in both title and description. Now all of the listings have been edited, so there is no repetition of the letters/word "GPS". Ok, that’s fair, thank you to whoever is responsible. No point in trying to hide the fact that most in the category are etailers with their eye on the keyword "GPS", ergo the reason for not allowing repetition.

This experience has prompted me to do some minor perusing of the dmoz directory. I discovered there is another category that is essentially a duplicate category called:

http://www.dmoz.com/Science/Earth_Sciences/Geomatics/GPS_-_Global_Positioning_System/Manufacturers_and_Dealers/

My questions are:

Why are there two categories that are in effect categorically the same (They both contain mostly etailers of GPS units)?

Within this category there are many listings with repeats in the title and description. Will these repeats also be edited out at some point in the future? Or does it have a different editor with different criteria? Is the criteria uniform among editors?

Thanks for your understanding, also for raising the issue of the duplicate categories.

How did that happen, you ask?

Category generation is driven by the presence of websites (either searched or suggested). When I have 20-50 Widget sites, I start asking how I should subdivide them. If I find a group of widget handcrafting sites, I might break down all the sites by source: Handcrafted, organically grown, synthetically manufactureed, etc. If I find distinct regional widget styles, I might break sites down by Continents. But this analysis is primarily based on just the sites at hand (in this category). (Most editors are responsible for specific categories, nobody knows the whole taxonomy, so this approach is inevitable.)

We have some general principles -- all shopping sites go together. But there are exceptions to that (Science tends to be one of them). And even without formal exceptions, sometimes editors build shopping subcategories because...well, the sites are submitted to there, they are relevant to the topic, and the editor doesn't know any better.)

Sooner or later, some visiting editor (or visitor, thanks!) notices an apparent overlap, and we have forums to hash out how best to address it. (This happens fairly often among our 400,000 categories.)

Which we shall now proceed to do. Since we try to work by editor consensus, you probably won't see a quick resolution.