Number of Editors per category

Maybe this is already in place and i have not noticed it :

Would it not be useful to show the number of editors in each category. This would help submitters guage how long it might take their site to be reviewed. For example :- a category with one editor and 1000 links is likely to be keeping that one editor very busy and it would be far more worthwhile for the submitter to take the risk on choosing a category close by to their actual category that is not so inundated.

The editor still has full control - so they can decline the entry if inappropriate . I think it would help speed up submissions that could take months or even years

We already do show all the editors named to a category at the bottom of its page. Also all the editors higher up the category tree and those on this list can and do work there.

This would help submitters guage how long it might take their site to be reviewed.

Click to expand...

We have absolutely no idea when a given site suggestion will be evaluated. Counting editors doesn't give us any kind of clue at all so I doubt if it would help you either.

I urge you not to deliberately suggest your site to the wrong category. When an editor visits the wrong category, s/he's likely to simply move it to the correct one's pile awaiting review. From your point of view, that would force two listing delays instead of one.

What Jim said.

This is a perpetual problem in these forums -- people are looking for some way of divining how long the editors will take. There isn't one. We don't know. We can't know. And without any understanding of the ODP processes, you're going to deduce what will happen in 5 months 3 days and 14 hours in the FUTURE from one number ... that might come from as much as two years in the past? Look, if you can do that, you're wasting your time here. Go predict the stock market next year based on two-year-old newspaper cartoon strips!

If you have a site that you badly want listed, the only way to preserve your sanity is to think of the process as completely random. You know the old screen saver where sprites randomly bounce around, changing the background color? Put ten thousand sprites on the screen, make it large enough that on average the screen takes, say, a year to cover; put ten thousand OTHER sprites (new submitters) changing the color back.

That's much much less random than the ODP.

Persons with mathematical backgrounds are invited to explain why (apart from the social and efficiency advantages of editor autonomy) this deliberate randomness is significantly more effective at creating a useful directory than deterministic approaches.

What you want to know, cannot be known. And that's a good thing. If it could be known, it would be a catastrophe for the quality of the ODP.

What Hutch and Jim said.

Also, the size of a category makes very little difference. As Hutch said, it is more random. There maybe a concerted effort on the part of many editors at any moment to tackle a large cat at once. On the flip side, a very small cat may rarely get visited, who knows. Believe me, eventually they all get looked at. Let me second the motion of not submitting to an incorrect category, that will only slow the process and waist editors time.
The best advise is to submit your site to the cat that you feel best fits your site, then forget about it. Really, I know it sounds crazy, but just let it go. There is no magic formula or knowledge that will give you any advantage. But worrying about weather your site gets listed in ODP will only drive you nuts. Trust me, I know.

Good luck.

I once processed 500 odd sites waiting for review in a single session. Removing a plague of spam I'll grant you but it shows how unreliable the number of sites waiting for review can be. I also know of categories with a couple of sites only waiting for review and the situation hasn't changed in a year. I am not a specific named editor on either category concerned. Often there is little correlation between the number of sites listed and those waiting. A big category may have an editor who processes 20 sites every day, A small and unpopular one may be left languishing until an editor one day sums up to interest to do something with it.