The Open Directory Project

If you have never come across the Open Directory Project a bit of background

The Open Directory Project is the largest, most comprehensive human-edited directory of the Web. It is constructed and maintained by a vast, global community of volunteer editors.

And they have high minded ideals

Instead of fighting the explosive growth of the Internet, the Open Directory provides the means for the Internet to organize itself. As the Internet grows, so do the number of net-citizens. These citizens can each organize a small portion of the web and present it back to the rest of the population, culling out the bad and useless and keeping only the best content.

And further

The Open Directory follows in the footsteps of some of the most important editor/contributor projects of the 20th century. Just as the Oxford English Dictionary became the definitive word on words through the efforts of a volunteers, the Open Directory follows in its footsteps to become the definitive catalog of the Web.

However in reality ideals are never as high as they are in the abstract. On the one hand the ODP has indexed "over 4 million sites" and has around 67,000 editors listed. Of these only 6000 or 7000 are active editors. And it begs the question as to who first of all wants to become an editor, why they want to edit and who approves them for the job.

The end result is that a motley mixture of editors exist, from the knowledgeable to the amateur, from the altruistic to the downright corrupt. As someone said "there is no such thing as a free lunch", and this tends to apply to ODP editors.

Consider the management hierarchy. A common or garden editor can only edit in a small portion of ODP, then as their number of edits grows, then they tend to rise in the hierarchy, getting a wider area of editorial responsability, until they become an NCO (Editall and then Meta) . That's as far as volunteers get. Next stage up is officer class, confined to paid managers from ODP's owners, AOL.

Problem is AOL acquired ODP, when they took over Netscape. AOL are not too interested in ODP, and little money or staff resources have been put into it. Hence ODP has been allowed to drift for a number of years now. And the NCOs can descend to Lord of the Flies type of behavior when left to their own devices.

So a mix of the good, the bad and the ugly. A real pity that they could not get their act together, and make ODP work for the user, rather than being allowed to lapse into something that has become of little relevance to anybody today