Setting a clear deadline 4 submission transaction

As far as I know, a Visa Section of British Embassy allows 17 working days to deal with visa applications, whatever how many applications there are, as they have alreadys put the situation into consideration. Thus applicants are quite clearly aware of their situations.

I know that the transaction to deal with submissions varies with complicated factors, but I wonder if DMOZ can also set a clear deadline, puting busiest situation into consideration as well, instead of a vague statement.

This is just what I am thinking. It might be a way of assuring and improving the transaction efficiency.
I hope that the suggestion doesn't offend you editors .

Re: Setting a clear deadline 4 submission transact

We are not offended; however, the major difference between ODP and the Embassy of choice might be that the Embassy charges a fee for the service and has a paid staff that can be instructed what to work on during a given day.

ODP's editorial staff are volunteers, and within a certain framework, they are free to work wherever they choose, and do as little or as much work as they choose.

The pros and cons of having a paid editorial staff has been discussed many, many times, and it is my personal opinion that the current volunteer-based model will not be changed to a for-pay model.

Re: Setting a clear deadline 4 submission transact

Thanks for your kind reply. I know that it's volunteers who are editing ODP. But I think that a system basing on volunteers also accounts for a policy of efficiency assurance. Otherwise, the less self-motivated system will lag itself behind others with higher efficency. This is my personal opinion.

Re: Setting a clear deadline 4 submission transact

I'm not personally offended by the question, I'm simply morally outraged. But the question still deserves a straight answer. No, it cannot.

If I, as a meta-editor, am going to indulge in control-freakery, the kind of control I'm going to exercise is a different kind altogether. I'm going to jump hard on anybody who tries to drive our volunteer editors away, sap their morale, or contemn their efforts by this kind of micro-management.

If you want to create that kind of community, go ahead: we won't stop you, or even discourage people from joining you. But that's not the kind of community we want, nor the kind of encentive we could successfully apply to it even if we wanted to.

Re: Setting a clear deadline 4 submission transact

I'm aware that I may offend some of you in proposing a question like this.

This is not for any personal attack. I'm here simply regarding myself as a member of you to discuss some possibilities to better DMOZ.

Whatever DMOZ will be, I won't get much economic benefit for it individually. And I am not going to and also am unable to sap anyone's morale.

Re: Setting a clear deadline 4 submission transact

You're not offending anyone by posting suggestions but keep in mind that most suggestions the people (including you) bring up are ones that have been brought up, sometimes many times, before and discarded as being inappropriate for our working model -- things like paying or offering other incentives to editors, paying for listings, or suggesting there be additional restrictions on what editors should or should not do (such as insisting on a specific reviewing timeframe or minimum amount of work from each editor). If we were ever forced into giving a specific timeframe for the review of a site, it would probably end up being something like "we guarantee that someone will look at your site within the next 5 to 10 years." Would that really be more helpful to you than the current situation?

Re: Setting a clear deadline 4 submission transact

The other difference between the Visa Section of British Embassy and ODP is that the former is there to process Visas, and that is their whole purpose, while ODP is not here to process submissions.

The purpose of ODP is to provide information on various topics by placing these topics into a hierarchical format and placing links about those topics into the categories. Submissions are one source we have for finding those links, but it's not the only one.

So where we concentrate our efforts is based not on the amount of submissions in a category or how much time a submission has waited, but on which categories are lacking a good amount of links to unique content on the topic.

Hopefully, that explanation will at least help you to understand our perspective on the issue, which is quite different than the perspective of the submitters.

Re: Setting a clear deadline 4 submission transact

The editor who does one or two editors a month may not seem to be doing much, compared to one who does hundreds a month, but that is what he volunteers to do. If we demand from him that he does a minimum of five edits a month, that may be more than what he wants to do, so he resigns. Now we have two edits a month that are no longer being achieved, no one is now going to jump in and do those two edits.

Multiply that by several hundred editors, and it has does not achieve the result of increasing the work being done.

It's not as though there is a surplus of good editors waiting to fill the breach.

There's a couple of other differences between visa applications and candidate entries in the OPD:

• The embassy is not swamped with multiple applications from the same person, many of them containing misleading or faked details
• If it does get faked/lying/multiple applications, it has recourse to several legal remedies.....If a visa is like an ODP entry, what's the equivalent of an international arrest warrant?
• People don't get issued surprise visas simply because the embassy staff did some research and thought: "hey that's a great person to visit my country!" Very many OPD entries are added without there ever being a suggestion from a webmaster,
  [/list:u]
  A better model might be asking someone out for a date....
  
  They don't have to reply in any given timescale, and they can say: "no" or: "ask me again after you've made some changes to your personal hygiene".
  
  But they are not obliged in any way to go out with you, even if you offer them money.
  
  There are people who will go out with you (and more) for money. They advertise heavily in the backs of certain magazines. But the OPD is not that kinda gal, and I don't think any of us would want her to be.