Status of Our Kids Press

Hello there - Well, it's been one year and two months since I submitted the Our Kids Press site to DMOZ in the following category:

http://dmoz.org/Reference/Education/Special_Education/Inclusion/

The URL submitted was:

http://www.ourkidspress.com

Has this site been reviewed, rejected, still in the queue???

Thanks,
May May

Still in the "non-queued heap" of sites waiting there.

In the heap

Hi, thanks for the information. Well, after waiting over a year, I think it's safe to write this submission off as an "exercise in futility"!

Thanks again,
May May

Up to you May May, I have listed sites that have been waiting 2, 3, 4 years. It just depends when an editor decides to look at that area. At the moment there seems to be a lack of editors with an interest in that field. Which is a pity, the category seems to fit the bill for a new editor.

4 years?

4 years???

Yes, I'm working in a Business/ category where submissions have been waiting since 2001!

Revamping the system

I truly appreciate the efforts of all the volunteers...

... But it seems to me, when a system becomes THIS backlogged, where work from 4 years ago is still waiting to be done -- then a NEW way of working is desperately required.

If more volunteers are not forthcoming, then it seems some other changes must be considered so that DMOZ remains vibrant and relevant and reflective of the actual businesses and organizations out there in cyber world.

Just an idea...

The date of the SUBMITTAL has nothing whatsoever with whether work is waiting to be done. In fact, it's completely irrelevant for all purposes whatsoever.

As far as reflective of actual businesses, that's the job of ... the actual business websites. The ODP is supposed to be reflective of actual information ... business information is a very small and relatively transient part of it.

Partly because of that, partly because businesses have other ways of reflecting themselves in the cyberworld, partly because business sites tend to be less interesting ... they represent a relatively neglected part of the ODP coverage.

Anyone who wants to change that has multiple options. But persuading ODP editors that they ought to abandon their more important work to allow more profit to website promoters is ... one of the least promising ones.

when a system becomes THIS backlogged, where work from 4 years ago is still waiting to be done -- then a NEW way of working is desperately required.

Click to expand...

It depends how you view the purpose and objctives of DMOZ. We who work on the project see it as a long-term collaborative effort to catalog the best sites on the Internet from all manner of sources. We don't have backlogs at all we just have pools of suggestions to pick from, alongside the sites we find from an extraordinary wide variety of sources. There are literally billions of sites we haven't looked at yet. Probably the majority of listed sites have never been suggested by their webmaster.* Those who suggest sites to us tend to think of us as a listing service akin to Yahoo! with a role in processing sites on behalf of webmasters to assist in their marketing and promotion. Unfortunately for them we are right and they are wrong.

One option for those concerned that parts of DMOZ that could be extremely useful to our users, the surfers not the webmasters, are under-represented is to consider editing. It has to be for the right reasons, a desire to see original content-rich resources on a particular subject cataloged for the benefit of all, not simply to list a site and leave. We welcome new editors every day who share that desire. As I said earlier we are currently lacking editors with an interest in your particular field but that could change tomorrow, all sites waiting for a review cleared in a day or so, and many more found through search engines, link pages, and you name it. It isn't beyond the bounds of possibility, it has happened thousands of times in thousands of categories.

* Evidence of this is that your own site was picked up by an editor without being suggested by you and listed in http://dmoz.org/Regional/North_Amer...Localities/B/Bellingham/Business_and_Economy/ (which does not have any impact on the suggestion you made to the Reference branch by ther way).

Our Kids Press

Thanks for the informative reply. I do see that the site is listed in another category. The odd thing is, when I search for the site from the DMOZ homepage, either by its title or by its URL, DMOZ returns "no results". Any ideas why that is?

I wrote to the editor of that category "renoir" and thanked him/her for his/her efforts and also mentioned the "search" quirk.

"Those who suggest sites to us tend to think of us as a listing service..." - you are quite right there. I believe that IS how many folks view DMOZ.

Are you saying that DMOZ is more a reflection of the individual and somewhat subjective tastes of all its editors? That's totally fine by me - knowing that helps understand what's going on.

Thanks again...May May

Reflection of individual editor interests, yes, but the combined interests of 50,000+ editors over the years and interests that vary considerably even for the same editor - I've edited in somewhere over 2500 different categories for example. Subjective is a term we'd rather not use, an editor's duty is to be totally objective when it comes to their editing though where they edit and how long they spend where they edit is entirely a matter of personal choice. The overall effect is an extremely broad base with pockets within it where activity is very stop-start.

For searching you would need the term ourkidspress.com but our search engine data is updated less frequently so give it a month or two to catch up. Not being a search engine the functionality of the search is limited and sometimes a bit cranky.

>Are you saying that DMOZ is more a reflection of the individual and somewhat subjective tastes of all its editors?

Well, the first answer is: yes, it is.

And that's a good thing. really.

First of all, several thousand active surfers is a pretty good sampling of surfers overall -- Harris Polls can predict the winner in a very close election with that size of sample.

Second, it really doesn't matter if the project is biassed. So is MSNBC.COM; so is the BBC; so is the New York Times or The Nation or even The Economist. The point is: this is the project built by people who share this bias. If you have another bias, build another project: I personally believe that the web needs more indexing tools, because none of them -- not Google, not Yahoo, not Froogle, not the ODP, not MSN's freaking ultimate monetization of their captive audience, not Aunt Sadie's knitting or porn or antiquarian links page -- none are adequate for all purposes. The ODP has a unique bias, and that's good.

Third, insofar as the sampling is biassed (and it is, by self-selection and group-selection of participants), it's biassed in the direction of volunteerism: whether it's collections of information, publications, or even local charitable organizations. And ... surely NOBODY on earth would venture to say the web as a whole is drifting too far in that direction: so the ODP acts as a tiny counterweight to an opposite commercial bias. Now, you or I cannot speak for our OWN websites: commercial or charitable, we are too emotionally involved. But surely we can agree that of all those OTHER webmasters out there, the commercial spammers are ruining things for everyone -- that is, nobody would say that (aside from their own sites) the web is insufficiently commercialized?

Fourth, I've participated in many ODP discussions over the years. And one of the commonly expressed biasses is that the ODP should be comprehensive. It won't ever have every site; it won't ever have every relevant page on any topic: but I have seen thousands of editor-hours invested on topics that really didn't interest the editor: because what DID interest the editor was having a representative set of topics. I've seen Buddhists, Pagans, various flavors of Christians, and assorted other religionists work together to fill in gaps in our Religion categories; I've seen left-wing and right-wing editors, American and European, work together to make a comprehensive list of political parties across the globe. I've seen Texans, Tennesseans, Californians, and even Canadians working together to build categories in states none of them had ever actually lived in, for communities they would never actually visit. Even if the DIRECTORY bias were not unique, the PROJECT organization has harnessed a level of effort that nobody else, commercial or noncommercial, could have supported. That is not in spite of its bias: it is largely because of it.

So the ODP's is not a kind of bias for which I see a need to be ashamed. That it doesn't always live up to its bias -- that is a bigger concern.