DMOZ

DMOZ was founded in the United States as Gnuhoo by Rich Skrenta and Bob Truel in 1998 while they were both working as engineers for Sun Microsystems. Chris Tolles, who worked at Sun Microsystems as the head of marketing for network security products, also signed on in 1998 as a co-founder of Gnuhoo along with co-founders Bryn Dole and Jeremy Wenokur. Skrenta had developed TASS, an ancestor of tin, the popular threaded Usenet newsreader for Unix systems. The original category structure of the Gnuhoo directory was based loosely on the structure of Usenet newsgroups then in existence.

The Gnuhoo directory went live on June 5, 1998. After Richard Stallman and the Free Software Foundation objected to the use of Gnu in the name, Gnuhoo was changed to NewHoo.[6] Yahoo! then objected to the use of Hoo in the name, prompting a proposed name change to ZURL.[7] Prior to switching to ZURL, NewHoo was acquired by Netscape Communications Corporation in October 1998 and became the Open Directory Project. Netscape released Open Directory data under the Open Directory License. Netscape was acquired by AOL shortly thereafter and DMOZ was one of the assets included in the acquisition.

DMOZ size by date, 1998 to 2015

By the time Netscape assumed stewardship, the Open Directory Project had about 100,000 URLs indexed with contributions from about 4500 editors. On October 5, 1999, the number of URLs indexed by DMOZ reached one million. According to an unofficial estimate, the URLs in DMOZ numbered 1.6 million in April 2000, surpassing those in the Yahoo! Directory.[8] DMOZ achieved the milestones of indexing two million URLs on August 14, 2000, three million listings on November 18, 2001, and four million on December 3, 2003. As of April 2013 there were 5,169,995 sites listed in over 1,017,500 categories. On October 31, 2015, there were 3,996,412 sites listed in 1,026,706 categories.

In January 2006, DMOZ began publishing online reports to inform the public about the development of the project. The first report covered the year 2005. Monthly reports were issued subsequently until September 2006.[9] These reports gave greater insight into the functioning of the directory than the simplified statistics provided on the front page of the directory. The number of listings and categories cited on the front page included "Test" and "Bookmarks" categories but these were not included in the RDF dump offered to users. There were about 7330 active editors during August 2006.[9] 75,151 editors had contributed to the directory as of March 31, 2007.[10] As of April 2013, the number of contributing editors had increased to 97,584.[10]

Gnuhoo borrowed the basic outline for its initial ontology from Usenet. In 1998, Rich Skrenta said, "I took a long list of groups and hand-edited them into a hierarchy."[19] For example, the topic covered by the comp.ai.alife newsgroup was represented by the category Computers/AI/Artificial_Life. The original divisions were for Adult, Arts, Business, Computers, Games, Health, Home, News, Recreation, Reference, Regional, Science, Shopping, Society, Sports and "World". While these sixteen top-level categories have remained intact, the ontology of second- and lower-level categories has undergone a gradual evolution; significant changes are initiated by discussion among editors and then implemented when consensus had been reached.

In July 1998, the directory became multilingual with the addition of the World top-level category. The remainder of the directory lists only English language sites. By May 2005, seventy-five languages were represented. The growth rate of the non-English components of the directory had been greater than the English component since 2002. While the English component of the directory held almost 75% of the sites in 2003, the World level grew to over 1.5 million sites as of May 2005, forming roughly one-third of the directory. The ontology in non-English categories generally mirrors that of the English directory, although exceptions which reflect language differences are quite common.

Several of the top-level categories have unique characteristics. The Adult category is not present on the directory homepage but it is fully available in the RDF dump that DMOZ provides. While the bulk of the directory is categorized primarily by topic, the Regional category is categorized primarily by region. This has led many to view DMOZ as two parallel directories: Regional and Topical.

On November 14, 2000, a special directory within DMOZ was created for people under 18 years of age.[20] Key factors distinguishing this "Kids and Teens" area from the main directory are:

• stricter guidelines which limit the listing of sites to those which are targeted or "appropriate" for people under 18 years of age;[21]
• category names as well as site descriptions use vocabulary which is "age appropriate";
• age tags on each listing distinguish content appropriate for kids (age 12 and under), teens (13 to 15 years old) and mature teens (16 to 18 years old);
• Kids and Teens content is available as a separate RDF dump;
• editing permissions are such that the community is parallel to that of DMOZ.

By May 2005, this portion of DMOZ included over 32,000 site listings.

From early 2004, the whole site was in UTF-8 encoding. Prior to this, the encoding had been ISO 8859-1 for English language categories and a language-dependent character set for other languages. The RDF dumps were encoded in UTF-8 from early 2000.

DMOZ was co-founded by Rich Skrenta (depicted in 2009, aged 42).

Restrictions are imposed on who can become an DMOZ editor. The primary gatekeeping mechanism is an editor application process wherein editor candidates demonstrate their editing abilities, disclose affiliations that might pose a conflict of interest, and otherwise give a sense of how the applicant would likely mesh with the DMOZ culture and mission.[29] A majority of applications are rejected but reapplying is allowed and sometimes encouraged. The same standards apply to editors of all categories and subcategories.

DMOZ's editing model is a hierarchical one. Upon becoming editors, individuals will generally have editing permissions in only a small category. Once they have demonstrated basic editing skills in compliance with the Editing Guidelines, they are welcome to apply for additional editing privileges in either a broader category or else another category in the directory. Mentorship relationships between editors are encouraged, and internal forums provide a vehicle for new editors to ask questions.

DMOZ has its own internal forums, the contents of which are intended only for editors to communicate with each other primarily about editing topics. Access to the forums requires an editor account and editors are expected to keep the contents of these forums private.[30]

Over time, senior editors can be granted additional privileges which reflect their editing experience and leadership within the editing community. The most straightforward is edit all privileges, which allow an editor to access all categories in the directory. Meta privileges additionally allow editors to perform tasks such as reviewing editor applications, setting category features, and handling external and internal abuse reports. Cateditall privileges are similar to edit all, but only for a single directory category. Similarly, catmod privileges are similar to meta, but only for a single directory category. Catmv privileges allow editors to make changes to directory ontology by moving or renaming categories. All of these privileges are granted by admins and staff, usually after discussion with meta editors.

In August 2004, a new level of privileges called admin was introduced. Administrator status was granted to a number of long serving metas by staff. Administrators have the ability to grant editall+ privileges to other editors and to approve new directory-wide policies, powers which had previously only been available to root (staff) editors.[31]

All DMOZ editors are expected to abide by DMOZ's Editing Guidelines. These guidelines describe editing basics: which types of sites may be listed and which may not; how site listings should be titled and described in a loosely consistent manner; conventions for the naming and building of categories; conflict of interest limitations on the editing of sites which the editor may own or otherwise be affiliated with; and a code of conduct within the community.[32] Editors who are found to have violated these guidelines may be contacted by staff or senior editors, have their editing permissions cut back, or lose their editing privileges entirely. DMOZ Guidelines are periodically revised after discussion in editor forums.

There have long been allegations that volunteer DMOZ editors give favorable treatment to their own websites while concomitantly thwarting the good faith efforts of their competition.[33] Such allegations are fielded by ODP's staff and meta editors, who have the authority to take disciplinary action against volunteer editors who are suspected of engaging in abusive editing practices.[34] In 2003, DMOZ introduced a new Public Abuse Report System that allows members of the general public to report and track allegations of abusive editor conduct using an online form.[35] Uninhibited discussion of DMOZ's purported shortcomings has become more common on mainstream webmaster discussion forums. Although site policies suggest that an individual site should be submitted to only one category,[36] as of October 2007, Topix.com, a news aggregation site operated by DMOZ founder Rich Skrenta, had more than 17,000 listings.[37]

Early in the history of DMOZ, its staff gave representatives of selected companies, such as Rolling Stone or CNN, editing access in order to list individual pages from their websites.[38] Links to individual CNN articles were added until 2004, but were entirely removed from the directory in January 2008[39] due to the content being outdated and not considered worth the effort to maintain. There have been no similar experiments with the editing policy since then.

Ownership and management

Screenshot taken in April 2017 showing DMOZ website to be closed

Underlying some controversy surrounding DMOZ is its ownership and management. Some of the original GnuHoo volunteers felt that they had been deceived into joining a commercial enterprise.[6] To varying degrees, those complaints have continued up until the present.

At DMOZ's inception, there was little thought given to the idea of how DMOZ should be managed and there were no official forums, guidelines or FAQs.[40]

As time went on, the ODP editor forums became the de facto DMOZ parliament, and when one of DMOZ's staff members would post an opinion in the forums, it would be considered an official ruling.[30] Even so, DMOZ staff began to give trusted senior editors additional editing privileges, including the ability to approve new editor applications, which eventually led to a stratified hierarchy of duties and privileges among DMOZ editors, with DMOZ's paid staff having the final say regarding DMOZ's policies and procedures.[31][41]

Robert Keating, a principal of Touchstone Consulting Group in Washington, D.C., since 2006, worked as AOL's program manager for DMOZ since 2004. He started working for AOL in 1999 as senior editor for AOL Search, then as managing editor, AOL Search, DMOZ, and then as media ecosystem manager, AOL Product Marketing.[42][43]

Chef Moz, an offshoot of DMOZ, was an open content directory of World Wide Web links of restaurants. The website was constructed and maintained by a community of volunteer editors, and owned by Netscape.

Chef Moz, similar to its parent DMOZ, used a hierarchical ontology scheme for organizing site listings. Listings on a similar topic were grouped into categories, which can then include smaller categories.

On February 17, 2011, DMOZ administrator "lisagirl" confirmed that Chef Moz was dead.[57]

• List of web directories

Wikidata has the property:

• Curlie ID (P998) (see uses)

• dmoz.org (Official website) at the Wayback Machine (archived March 14, 2017)