make brief look at some DMOZ numbers before submission. Find an appropriate niche and a niche with a plenty of editors. http://www.we-globe.net/WebLab/Dmoz/GlobalNumberOfSubcategories.html
Nice to see the numbers but... Deliberately suggest your website to the wrong category and the editor will just send it over to the correct one[1]. That means double the wait time for you and wasted effort that could have been avoided for us. That wasted effort could have been better spent doing something useful (like reducing wait times ). Please, don't try to game the system. It rarely achieves anything good. [1]At least, that's what's supposed to happen. There's always the possibility that an inexperienced editor will simply delete it out of hand .
An extensive analysis mq778b, and I'm sure people will study those tables with interest. Your data about hosts and site listings is probably accurate, but I'm afraid there's a basic flaw in many of your results, probably due to a misunderstanding about editor permissions. No volunteer is "assigned" to a category, and the names listed under a category are only a few of the 200+ people who can edit there if they feel like it. So the table entitled "Super Editors (Editors Assigned to Upper Level Categories)" is unfortunately meaningless, as are all references to the "Number of Editors" in a given area. Also, as editors gain more permissions, they usually remove their names from the subcats which they can edit "from above", or in which they are no longer interested. Being listed in a large number of categories (eg "Top 100 Multitopic Editors") doesn't mean that the editor is active in any of them. (In fact that volunteer can keep his account by doing just one edit every 4 months in a subcategory where he is no longer listed, which is absolutely fine, of course.) Finally, most editors with directory-wide permissions (such as editalls and metas), leave their names on just a few categories of special interest to them. But that doesn't mean they actually edit in those categories, and they may in fact spend all their time in categories where they are not named. mq778b I am sorry to put a dampener on what must have been a lot of work, but it would be unfortunate for people to get the wrong idea. Due to the factors I have outlined, and the volunteer nature of the directory, there simply is no way at all for a non-editor to try and work out who edits where, or how many volunteers are active in a category.
the statement is right for any statistical calcs. If a mean american family contains 3.1415926 kids, it does not mean there is a family with such amount of kids. But the info itself may be still useful. The tables actually generated from DMOZ rdf and reflects the status of rdf data, not the real DMOZ lifestyle. May be some day, DMOZ will adjust for every external link resposible editor, to make the things be more clear.
I think even experienced editors could do it. It would depend on how far off the site was. If the "wrong" category is half way across the directory and the editor has no clue where the right one is, it's likely just easier to simply nix it. After all, it was not the "single most very bestest category" to submit too, so it did break the guidelines and should not be listed at that time anyway.
I don't know what is your purpose of compiling this list but if you want to make a list that is useful and generate visitors to your site, use a scrapper script and generate a list of categories that get NEW editors on weekly basis. This list can be a gold mine for those who want to get a link in DMOZ. I don't get in to the detail of how , but it is not difficult to figure it out.
Such a list would certainly be interesting in terms of showing just how many new editor applications are successful, when the public forums are often ringing with the complaints of those whose applications did not meet the required standard. But I'm afraid in terms of providing a shortcut to a DMOZ listing, it would be just as unhelpful as the other tables (see my post above), for the following simple reasons: For many reasons, and despite other volunteers' specific encouragement, a high proportion of new editors fail to use their accounts at all. Secondly, even if they do make a start, they might do just one or two edits before losing interest or deciding this hobby is just not for them. Thirdly, (unless they receive continuing assistance and guidance from a more experienced volunteer) they are quite likely to delete site suggestions that don't belong in that category. But most importantly, as I explained in my post above (repeating the statements of many others before me), volunteers are simply not required to review suggested sites at all.
Sadly true, but fortunately many of us are willing to supplement the public documentation by repeatedly explaining how the directory works, and what volunteer editors actually do there.