Alright, we're being serious. DMOZ has never been crap. It's a bunch of people who give their time to building an excellent directory, and most of them are genuine. Yes, there are some who abuse it, and there are bound to be some who think of it as their own but, generally speaking, it works as well as it is able to work, and the data in the directory is good.
But there are problems. One of them is that they don't have enough editors and there are reasons for that. Many people have become editors for their own ends; they sort their own site(s) out and don't do much else. DMOZ can't be blamed for that. Another reason is that they turn down many potentially good editors and, to some extent, they are to blame for that because they don't normally encourage good applicants to try again when they apply for categories that are too large, and things like that. They just reject the apllication and the person doesn't try again. That's a mistake. I had this out with them at resource-zone and I believe the thread is still the longest and most viewed of all the threads there. Many, possibly most, applications are rejected because of bad grammer, bad spelling, etc. They cannot tell people the reason for those rejections because they would try again and make sure that everything was in order - even by getting someone else to write the stuff for them. Then DMOZ would end up with editors who can't spell or write well enough, and that would be bad.
Yet another reason for the lack of editors is that people join, intending to do a good job, but get bored with it and stop doing anything. So DMOZ always has too few active editors. Unlike some of the other well-known directories (GoGuides, JoeAnt and Zeal), where new editors cannot add sites to the directory but can only suggest sites by writing the Titles and Descriptions, new DMOZ editors can add sites to the live directory straight away. Therefore, they need to be good editors from the start.
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Originally Posted by JS
A web directory is there to serve as a listing of all related sites for a given topic.
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Each directory decides what sites to include. For instance, Gimpsy has decided to include only sites that provide an online service. Purely informational sites aren't accepted. It seems odd to me, but that's their policy. DMOZ has decided to accept only sites that contain unique content, which means that a lot of sites can't get in because they are not offering anything that isn't already in the directory. So directories are not there to list
all related sites. They are there to list the sites they choose to list.
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Originally Posted by JS
Instead, the meta editors treat it as their own personal bookmark directory.
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It is quite possible that some metas treat the directory as their own, especially if they've been around a very long time, but I don't believe that it's the norm. Having said that, who is there who can think of the directory as their own in the way that you mean? Certainly not the owners, because they've hardly ever had anything to do with it. The staff (who are above metas)? Yes. The metas (senior management)? Yes. The staff and metas run it as they see fit. Why shouldn't they feel that it's their directory? It
is their directory inasmuch as they are in complete charge of it, although none of them actually own it.
But you mean that there are metas who do favours for their 'friends'. Maybe there are, but I seriously doubt that it's widespread. I'm pretty sure that metas have been dumped in the past for abusing their position.
The problem is that people at DMOZ (editors and metas) make decisions that are sometimes not liked by some people, and those people think that DMOZ is corrupt in some way. Whilst there will often/always be corruption at all levels in such organisations, on the whole, DMOZ is pretty clean.