Open Directory Project should be renamed to Closed Directory Project

>But does ZEAL have the clout of DMOZ?

Perhaps not. Yet. But who cares? If you're on a power trip, neither ODP editing nor Zeal editing will be a congenial or rewarding activity anyway. Editors are typically on an accomplishment trip. The ODP approach tends to make influence follow accomplishment.

On the other hand, consider that recent ODP editor applicant who said he'd be editing at Zeal (and JoeAnt, IIRC) while he was waiting for the response from ODP. There's an attitude that'll lead to accomplishment.

>>From all the sites I have rejected only a handfull might be changed to become listable. For the other sites rejected by me I never want the owner to know why we didn't list his crap.

>it reflects editors' mutual attitude so well!

Of course: because it reflects such an obvious and rational reaction to the reality any experienced editor will have seen.

And of course, you'll find exactly the same attitude towards the same reality at Google and other search engines: so do they tell search-engine-gaming spammers how they spot artificial link strategies? Not likely!

Perhaps one of a thousand sites that I reject, I would like to list, so I send the owner an email saying why the site was rejected. These are cases where there is something minor worng that could be fixed. Perhaps 30% of these get fixed and resubmitted.

Sites that are under construction are so far from being listed I'm not going to waste time telling anyone. I thing it's insulting to editors to submit them.

Site that are spamming with multiple URLs pretending to be different companies - I'm not going to give the site ower a hint as to the fact he's been caught.

Site that are submitted to the wrong categroyr because thw owner did not bother to read the instructions, I just move to the right category. If he did not read the instuctions - he probably won't read the email.

My practice is similar to Bobrats, however, when I find missubmitted sites, I do things slightly differently.

If the site was closely submitted. i.e. maybe off by a subcat or two, and if I can see the logic in the submission, I will spend as much time as necessary finding the correct cat.

If the site is wildly missubmitted, I'll just toss it in the general direction of the right cat on the theory that someone too lazy to submit to the correct cat, or close to the correct, does not deserve much of my time and energy. I will not reward laziness.

By Open It Should Mean Accountable And Transparent, And This Directory Is Clearly Not!

It's a big world, and feel free to make your own directory with those precepts, but Open in ODP only means the RDF dump of the directory content is openly available

Open has never meant anything else, despite how much people wish it did.

It does not mean it's Open Source, cause it is not.

It does not mean the editor logs are open for view, because they are not, and an editor that publishes them will be axed.

It does not mean that the methods used to find spammers and abusers will be made public.

And it does not mean that the directory is open for every site that exists to be listed.

Lack of respect

You gave me a good idea!

I'll probably be joining a Brazilian directory such as Brazillink (www.brazillink.org) since I am Brazilian!

At least, I bet I will be able to get a proper reply regarding my submission - it won't be as an editor because I am not that qualified as these are! But hopefully they will accept me as a contributor and value my willingness to help.

I've been reading your forum, different threads, and it's interesting because it gives me a good insight into what ODP has become...

I've just go a reply in a different thread saying that directories are not accepted because one could copy their content. What a shame and lack of respect of other people's work! Considering that directories usually include an awful lot of websites, so much would have to be copied! And categories too!

>Considering that directories usually include an awful lot of websites, so much would have to be copied! And categories too!

Um, fascinating. But I'd rather base MY considerations on reality.

The fact is, most so-called "directories" don't have many links. It is very very rare to find one that has content comparable to Yahoo in a category, much less comparable to the ODP!

And the fact is, directories are hard to maintain. Most contain many dead links -- as the ODP did before we had our robot link checker, and as it still does when we go too long between Robozilla runs.

As to categories, typically each directory has its own concept of taxonomy, as you'd know if you had actually bothered to carefully compare any two directory structures. It simply doesn't make sense to copy someone else's categories, since they have meaning only within a particular taxonomy. Even if it did make sense, one could ask whether it would be legal -- and only a California judge could answer that question for the ODP (and presumably, only a Brazilian judge, for brazillink). But in practice, the question really doesn't arise. Even back in the days when Looksmart was copying my ODP descriptions (complete with my own original spelling errors, so I was sure it was plagiarism) -- they didn't copy the ODP taxonomy. And of course _I_ wouldn't have claimed the URLs. And ... I wasn't in it for whatever you're in it for: I was happy that the subject was better promoted on the web because of my work -- and that's what _I_ was interested in.

Of course, if that's not what you're interested in, the ODP will naturally seem strange, mysterious, opaque, uncontrollable, feral -- and probably threatening -- to you. And since so many people are more interested in self-promotion than in any particular subject, so you'll find a lot of people who share that attitude.

My aim here is two-fold:

I am trying to understand why I was rejected as an editor on the basis of the sites I sugested and I've been told already that one of them was not suitable (www.brazilink.org).

hutcheson said:

>The fact is, most so-called "directories" don't have many links. It is very very rare to find one that has content comparable to Yahoo in a category, much less comparable to the ODP!

This website has a huge number of links and offers different subjects. Besides, it also includes links to search, site map and different languages of websites listed there.

hutcheson said:

>And the fact is, directories are hard to maintain. Most contain many dead links -- as the ODP did before we had our robot link checker, and as it still does when we go too long between Robozilla runs.

This site is continuously updated by volunteer students working with their teachers (seems to be the case from what I understood)

Following rules blindly such as "not accepting directories" takes away the human side of the ODP: the capacity for thinking.
By replying/evaluating thousands of sites and potential editors daily makes me wonder whether one can possibly do it without making far too many mistakes. Everything has to be looked very quickly insn't? How come then it is possible to evaluate sites and people fairly?

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Following rules blindly such as "not accepting directories" takes away the human side of the ODP: the capacity for thinking.

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We do list directories. We have specific categories for listing directories in, all over the directory. We are just very picky about which directories we accept.

In ont of the other threads where you have been discussing this, you were told with regard to your use of a directory site in your application:

brazilink.org does not belong in that category. It is a portal/directory, not a news and media site (its news feeds, being Moreover feeds, are not considered content for the purposes of site listability). Directories do not belong in News and Media, they belong in Guides and Directories (if that existed) or at the root of the location (it is doesn't). Arguing with us about it in this case isn't going to make your misclassification of the site right.

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So it's not about whether the brazilink.org site is content-rich or not. It's about whether it would belong in the category you applied for, in the first place.

By replying/evaluating thousands of sites and potential editors daily makes me wonder whether one can possibly do it without making far too many mistakes. Everything has to be looked very quickly insn't? How come then it is possible to evaluate sites and people fairly?

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We're more often accused of looking at things too slowly Seriously, no, no editor can review thousands of sites daily. Most of us have jobs, families and other things to do with our free time, after all. But all editors together, as a group, review thousands of listings every day, and the meta editors as a group probably review over a hundred editor applications every day. We really do try to take as much time for each site, and each editor application, as it needs, though. Many sites don't need a lot of time to review them -

We're human. We make mistakes. I had occasion once to go through several thousand submittals that had already been processed once. Based on that, I think our error rate is about 1%. That's why I'd suggest two submittals, at least six months apart -- because the chance of two errors on a site is negligable.

There is, of course, a trade-off. As nea says, we probably err in the direction of over-perfectionism. But that goes with the personality type that collaborative volunteer efforts like the ODP tend to attract.

You're right about blind rules. That's why we don't have any such rule as you describe. It's a matter of judgment. And what you're hearing is the collective judgment of such editors as participate in this forum -- not any official (or even unofficial) rule. Now, it's no coincidence that editors representing several hundred thousand site reviews have described the same experiential judgment: MOST directories aren't worth listing. (Many of them aren't worth mining for links.) I've listed a few directories, however, because every site has to be reviewed on its own account, not as a "member of a class". Being a member of a class just gives us (based on experience) some probabilistic information on how likely it is to be useful (thus, how quickly we should review it), and where we are most likely to find unique content in it.

Since we're discussing general rules, the fact that one particular site does or doesn't fit any particular common profile isn't relevant. The person who reviews the site you mention probably won't have read this discussion (or if read, probably won't have remembered it.) And, while what you say about the site may be true, obviously the reviewer ought to base the review on the site itself, not what anyone says about it somewhere else.