Descriptionless Listings?

Is there any reason why there should be listings in the ODP that don't have descriptions? I'm talking about a category that I noticed where there are site titles but no descriptions for some of those sites. The editor is an active one so I'm wondering what reason there could be for this kind of oversight. thanks.

Short answer: no. <img src="/images/icons/smile.gif" alt="" />

However they happened, there are categories (often those that were created early) where blank descriptions have slipped through the cracks. There's currently a team of editors working on correcting these oversights. Try contacting the local editor about it first, and if that doesn't resolve the problem, you're welcome to contact an editall or meta with the name of the category. We can then notify the blankbusting team whereupon it should be taken care of.

1) Little bit of "historical" addon to this, if someone should wonder about areas where huge percentages are without any description:

Once upon a time there was no rule that "every listing should have a description". Long, long time ago when thinking in internet-timescale - not so long when being in real live. <img src="/images/icons/wink.gif" alt="" />

So there are huge areas with descriptionless entries. Needless to say, that correcting thousands of such listings needs a lot of time <img src="/images/icons/smile.gif" alt="" />

2) Another thing I encountered lately: Some of us editors use a lot of tools to speed up simple tasks as correcting usual typos. I know of one (old version of a) tool that choked on some special characters and deleted the description if it found one. <img src="/images/icons/frown.gif" alt="" /> Several other "reasons" why this could happen are imaginable - but nevertheless every entry should have a proper description.

Sometimes misguided new editors don't add descriptions, but most of the 'blanks' are old entries that haven't been updated. As has been said, there is a concerted effort to eradicate these from the directory. The guidelines now specifically state that all sites must have a description.

On the other hand, I've noticed many current descriptions are little more than sales pitches for products; some appear to be verbatim statements that might come straight off the sites' pages. Do an ODP search for "best prices" or "great deals" or "guaranteed lowest prices", and you might be disappointed at the large number of sites that show up. In cases like these, no description is probably better than poorly written pure-hype descriptions like these.

One of the HypeBusters will get to them eventually. The BlankBusters people are always on the lookout for sites without descriptions. With new editors joining every day these problems will never be completely eliminated. All we can do is hope to minimise them. It goes without saying that an editor with a repeated pattern of these mistakes is sent an email by a Meta and given a week or two at most to clean up, before someone else wades in and does it for them.

On the matter of hype-busting, it seems a possible approach might be for a programmer to write a script to address one type of problem. Where a description is obviously over the top in terms of hype, why not have a script or some program that seeks and either replaces or destroys?

The simplest thing to do is first determine any single term or phrase that is absolutely intolerable. Then seek out any descriptions that have this term (phrase) and delete entirely all such descriptions that contain those terms. If it's unacceptable for the phrase "lowest prices" to appear in a description, just eliminate all such descriptions with a single command. If the phrase is beyond the pale for some reason, instruct the program to delete not only the description, but possibly the entire site. That may be going a bit far, but you get the idea. It ought to be possible to automate certain functions that could do some jobs instantly that may take editors many hours (or days, weeks, months...) to accomplish manually.

Anything that works to ease the burden shouldn't be overlooked.

Whilst I don't think it's a bad idea per se, the reality is that it creates more work in the end. If you remove the descriptions they become blanks, which is probably worse than having a hyped description. We try to remove both, and the editor that removes hype writes a new description at the same time.

If a script just removed the offending phrase - it wouldn't always be correct. There are probably cases where that phrase/word is correctly used. It also would leave descriptions that were senseless - remove 'we are the best' from 'We are the best and largest company in the industry.' leaves 'and largest company in the industry.' (not capitalised, starts with 'and') whereas an editor would see the whole sentence is marketing bull and remove all of it.

Scripts are fine, but try and do a find and replace all on a complex document sometime and you'll find some things you didn't want to change, are 'fixed' as well. Imagine the number of possible automated errors in 3.8 million sites <img src="/images/icons/tongue.gif" alt="" /> .

We do use the internal search function to find problems and present results with editing buttons. There is an internal place where we save searches for typical hype phrases. Periodically an editall will check the saved searches for new occurrences and fix them. Part of the benefit of doing it manually is not only to actually write a better description, but to notice a category with lots of problems or another editor not following the guidelines.

The internal forum thread to report hype is actually kind of funny!