How to change from a category which has no editor.

To all forum members,
Our Web site, www.mothergoose.com, has been posted continuously at the same ISP since 1995. Our original content was a few illustrated nursery rhymes, but we now offer a series of preschool lesson plans for daycare and kindergarten, kid's free activities, crafts, and stories plus a history and collection of nursery rhymes.

The site's current listing is under the Open Directory Category of Society: Folklore: Literature: Rhymes: Nursery: Mother Goose. This category has no editor to contact, so I am posting here for guidance.

I believe our site's new content--lesson plans for preschool and daycare centers plus many free children's activities--should place it in the category of Reference: Education: Early Childhood.

Can someone please tell me whether this change of category will be possible and, if yes, what I might do to implement it. Thank you very much for your help.
Sincerely,
Pat

Hi,

You could use the "request an update" form, or email the next-level editor in Folklore. That person is able to edit everything below Folklore.

If the editor doesn't edit in the new category, he or she will have to move it to unreviewed to wait for approval.

Dear vmcknight,
Thank you for your response. I have been trying to get the category for www.mothergoose.com changed for the past three months, but without success. I had first submitted to Education: Early Childhood and a month later to Education: Products: Early Childhood. I sent an e-mail to the editor explaining that the content on our site no longer fits under the Nursery Rhyme category, but I received no answer.

I was beginning to suspect that the problem with our submission was that we are already listed in a category. I hate to delete a DMOZ listing, but will now ask the editor to take us off and hope that a new DMOZ category editor will put us back in the right place.

Our site is currently listed in Society: Folklore (no editor): Literature: Rhymes (no editor): Nursery (no editor): Mother Goose (no editor), so I will ask the Literature editor to remove our site. Is that right?

I am much encouraged to receive an answer to this post within only a few hours.
Thank you very much,
Pat

Dont send a request for deletion, send a request for *moving* the entry instead, if you feel so. Keep in mind every entry is processed by a human, so you can feel totally free to write anything in the comments you like to. Even in the description you give you can put some comments for the editor [maybe in brackets like here] /images/icons/smile.gif

There is a bit of a backlog in that area of Education and your site hasn't been looked at yet. I am hoping I might be able to do some work in that area in a week or so. Best bet would be to give it a couple more weeks before requesting an update.

To All,
Thank you very much. Waiting another week or so is definitely more appealing than my idea of asking to have my current DMOZ listing deleted in order to qualify for a new category. I am very grateful for your help and hope the site can be moved to either Education: Early Childhood (or Early Childhood: Products).
Sincerely,
Pat

We don't have a good procedure for the request you've made. In principle you should do an "update URL" request (asking for change description and move to new category). But...

The problem is not the lack of editor in the category you're moving from. It could be processed by an editor of any higher level category...by simply moving the site to Reference/Education/etc. The problem is lack of an editor in the Ref/Ed category. If the Folklore editor doesn't also edit in Ref/Ed, the site goes into "Unreviewed" (disappearing from the directory) until it is re-reviewed by a Ref/Ed editor (where, as has been mentioned, there is a huge backlog.)

That, IMO, is a nasty thing to to do a webmaster who was trying to help us keep our directory entry relevant. And so a thoughtful Folklore editor wouldn't do it -- they would leave the "update URL" request for an editall to handle, so that the site would reappear immediately in Ref/Ed. Which, IMO, will greatly delay correcting a bad site listing -- which is a nasty thing to do to the directory itself: bad listings should be fixed as quickly as possible.

By asking here, you probably did the best thing you could do. (But if 1000 people a month start doing that, I suspect it might break this forum down.)

And since I can edit in both places (and even used to be listed on a supercategory of Mother Goose) I moved the site, with a quick review (and perhaps minimalistic description). It's now listed in Reference: Education: Products and Services: Early Childhood. This reflects the "commercial product" and "targeted to professional teachers of young children" aspects of the site.

Re: How to change from a category which has no edi

Dear Hutcheson,
Thank you very much for your analysis of the problem and for placing our site in the new category. I hope your solution does not generate more work for editors and trust that there may not be too many situations like ours. Since this is the first time we have submitted our site to search engines, we were quite surprised to find that it was already on several search engine lists and none reflected "Preschool" (without the hyphen) which is the basic category for content used by preschool teachers and preschool children.

Thank you for helping us get from there to here over what seemed like treacherous water.
Sincerely,
Pat

Re: How to change from a category which has no edi

>>I hope your solution does not generate more work for editors ...

No, no problem, just that it needs to be seen by someone who can edit in both categories.

>>...and trust that there may not be too many situations like ours.

Sigh. There are no unique problems here. I suspect there are several hundred such cases per month, some of which we don't notice...and the rate will grow as the ODP matures or as it grows -- both of which are happening simultaneously. Eventually we'll have to come up with a standard procedure for this.

>>Since this is the first time we have submitted our site to search engines, we were quite surprised to find that it was already on several search engine lists.

Hey, over at _ODP_ we don't just sit around waiting for sites to be submitted.;/images/dmoz/purplegrin.gif We hunt them out. And the rest sometimes, um, recycle our entries.;/images/dmoz/purplegrin.gif