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= dmoz =
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Introduction
======================================================================
DMOZ or DMoz (stylized dmoz in its logo; from 'directory.mozilla.org',
an earlier domain name) was a multilingual open-content directory of
World Wide Web links. The site and community who maintained it were
also known as the Open Directory Project (ODP). It was owned by AOL
(now a part of Yahoo! Inc) but constructed and maintained by a
community of volunteer editors.
DMOZ used a hierarchical ontology scheme for organizing site listings.
Listings on a similar topic were grouped into categories which then
included smaller categories.
DMOZ closed on March 17, 2017, because AOL no longer wished to support
the project. The website became a single landing page on that day,
with links to a static archive of DMOZ, and to the DMOZ discussion
forum, where plans to rebrand and relaunch the directory were being
discussed.
, a non-editable mirror remained available at dmoztools.net, and it
was announced that while the DMOZ URL would not return, a successor
version of the directory named Curlie would be provided. DMOZ, ODP,
and Curlie were considered synonymous by 2018. Curlie was well
established by 2022, using the hierarchy from DMOZ.
History
======================================================================
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'. Yahoo! then objected to the
use of 'Hoo' in the name, prompting a proposed name change to 'ZURL'.
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.
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. 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. 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. 75,151
editors had contributed to the directory as of March 31, 2007. As of
April 2013, the number of contributing editors had increased to
97,584.
System failure and editing outage, October to December 2006
=============================================================
On October 20, 2006, DMOZ's main server suffered a catastrophic
failure that prevented editors from working on the directory until
December 18, 2006. During that period, an older build of the directory
was visible to the public. On January 13, 2007, the Site Suggestion
and Update Listings forms were again made available. On January 26,
2007, weekly publication of RDF dumps resumed. To avoid future
outages, the system resided on a redundant configuration of two
Intel-based servers from then on.
The site's interface was given an upgrade in 2016, branded "DMOZ 3.0",
but AOL took it offline the following year.
Competing and spinoff projects
================================
As DMOZ became more widely known, two other major web directories
edited by volunteers and sponsored by Go.com and Zeal emerged, both
now defunct. These directories did not license their content for open
content distribution.
The concept of using a large-scale community of editors to compile
online content has been successfully applied to other types of
projects. DMOZ's editing model directly inspired at least three other
open content volunteer projects: music site MusicMoz, an open content
restaurant directory known as ChefMoz and an encyclopedia known as
Open Site. Finally, according to Larry Sanger, DMOZ was part of the
inspiration for the Nupedia project, out of which Wikipedia grew.
Logo history
==============
GnuHoo logo.png|Original logo as from June 1998
NewHoo logo.png|Logo after rebranding as NewHoo
Open Directory Project logo.png|Logo after acquisition by Netscape
DMOZ Open Directory Project logo.png|Logo from 1999 to 2014 with the
name DMOZ
DMOZ logo.png|Logo from March 2014
DMOZ logo.svg|Logo from June 2016 until the closing in March 2017
Curlie-logo.png|Curlie logo (2019)
Content
======================================================================
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." 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. 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;
* 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.
Maintenance
=============
Directory listings were maintained by editors. While some editors
focused on the addition of new listings, others focused on maintaining
the existing listings, and some did both. This included tasks such as
the editing of individual listings to correct spelling and/or
grammatical errors, as well as monitoring the status of linked sites.
Still others went through site submissions to remove spam and
duplicate submissions.
Robozilla was a Web crawler written to check the status of all sites
listed in DMOZ. Periodically, Robozilla would flag sites which
appeared to have moved or disappeared and editors follow up to check
the sites and take action. This process was critical for the directory
in striving to achieve one of its founding goals: to reduce the link
rot in web directories. Shortly after each run, the sites marked with
errors were automatically moved to the unreviewed queue where editors
may investigate them when time permits.
Due to the popularity of DMOZ and its resulting impact on search
engine rankings (See PageRank), domains with lapsed registration that
were listed on DMOZ attracted domain hijacking, an issue that was
addressed by regularly removing expired domains from the directory.
While corporate funding and staff for DMOZ diminished over time,
volunteers created editing tools such as linkcheckers to supplement
Robozilla, category crawlers, spellcheckers, search tools that
directly sift a recent RDF dump, bookmarklets to help automate some
editing functions, mozilla based add-ons, and tools that helped work
through unreviewed queues.
License and requirements
==========================
DMOZ data was previously made available under the terms of the Open
Directory License, which required a specific DMOZ attribution table on
every Web page that uses the data.
The Open Directory License also included a requirement that users of
the data continually check DMOZ site for updates and discontinue use
and distribution of the data or works derived from the data once an
update occurs. This restriction prompted the Free Software Foundation
to refer to the Open Directory License as a non-free documentation
license, citing the right to redistribute a given version not being
permanent and the requirement to check for changes to the license.
In 2011, DMOZ silently changed its license to a Creative Commons
Attribution license, which is a free license (and GPL compatible).
RDF dumps
===========
DMOZ data is made available through an RDF-like dump that is published
on a download server, older versions are also archived there. New
versions are usually generated weekly. A DMOZ editor has catalogued a
number of bugs that are encountered in the DMOZ RDF dump, most
importantly that the file format is not RDF. So while today the
so-called RDF dump is valid XML, it is not valid RDF and as such,
software to process the DMOZ RDF dump needs to be specifically written
for DMOZ data.
Content users
===============
DMOZ data powers the core directory services for many of the Web's
largest search engines and portals, including Netscape Search, AOL
Search, and Alexa. Google Directory used DMOZ information, until being
shuttered in July 2011.
Other uses are also made of DMOZ data. For example, in the spring of
2004 Overture announced a search service for third parties combining
Yahoo! Directory search results with DMOZ titles, descriptions and
category metadata. The search engine Gigablast announced on May 12,
2005, its searchable copy of DMOZ. The technology permits search of
websites listed in specific categories, "in effect, instantly creating
over 500,000 vertical search engines".
, DMOZ listed 313 English-language Web sites that use DMOZ data as
well as 238 sites in other languages. However, these figures do not
reflect the full picture of use, as those sites that use DMOZ data
without following the terms of the DMOZ license are not listed.
Policies and procedures
======================================================================
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.
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.
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.
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. 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.
Controversy and criticism
======================================================================
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. 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. 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. 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, as of October 2007,
Topix.com, a news aggregation site operated by DMOZ founder Rich
Skrenta, had more than 17,000 listings.
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. Links to
individual CNN articles were added until 2004, but were entirely
removed from the directory in January 2008 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
==========================
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. 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.
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. 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.
Robert Keating, a principal of Touchstone Consulting Group in
Washington, D.C., worked as AOL's program manager for DMOZ beginning
in 2004. He started working for AOL in 1999 as senior editor for AOL
Search, then as managing editor for AOL's DMOZ program, and then as
media ecosystem manager of AOL Product Marketing.
Editor removal procedures
===========================
DMOZ's editor removal procedures are overseen by DMOZ's staff and
meta-editors. According to DMOZ's official editorial guidelines,
editors are removed for abusive editing practices or uncivil
behaviour. Discussions that may result in disciplinary action against
volunteer editors take place in a private forum which can only be
accessed by DMOZ's staff and meta editors. Volunteer editors who are
being discussed are not given notice that such proceedings are taking
place. Some people find this arrangement distasteful, wanting instead
a discussion modeled more like a trial held in the U.S. judicial
system.
In the article "Editor Removal Explained", DMOZ meta editor Arlarson
states that "a great deal of confusion about the removal of editors
from DMOZ results from false or misleading statements by former
editors".
The DMOZ's confidentiality guidelines prohibit any current DMOZ
editors in a position to know anything from discussing the reasons for
specific editor removals, however a list of potential reasons was
provided in the guidelines. In the past, this has led to removed DMOZ
editors wondering why they cannot log in at DMOZ to perform their
editing work.
David F. Prenatt Jr., former DMOZ editor 'netesq', and another former
editor known by the alias 'The Cunctator', both claim to have been
removed for disagreeing with staff about changes to policies,
particularly DMOZ's copyright policies. According to their claims,
staff use the excuse of uncivil behaviour as a means to remove
bothersome editors.
Blacklisting allegations
==========================
Senior DMOZ editors have the ability to attach "warning" or "do not
list" notes to individual domains but no editor has the unilateral
ability to block certain sites from being listed. Sites with these
notes might still be listed and at times notes are removed after some
discussion.
Hierarchical structure
========================
Criticism of DMOZ's hierarchical structure emerged by around 2005.
Many believe hierarchical directories are too complicated. With the
emergence of Web 2.0, folksonomies began to appear, and some editors
proposed that folksonomies, networks and directed graphs are more
"natural" and easier to manage than hierarchies.
Search
========
The ODPSearch software is a derivative version of Isearch which is
open-source, licensed under the Mozilla Public License.
Editor forums
===============
The ODP Editor Forums were originally run on software that was based
on the proprietary Ultimate Bulletin Board system. In June 2003, they
switched to the open source phpBB system. As of 2007, these forums
were powered by a modified version of phpBB.
Bug tracking
==============
The bug tracking software used by the ODP is Bugzilla and the web
server Apache. Squid web proxy server was also used but it was removed
in August 2007 when the storage servers were reorganized. All these
applications are open source.
Interface
===========
The DMOZ database/editing software is closed source (although Richard
Skrenta has said in June 1998 that he was considering licensing it
under the GNU General Public License). This has led to criticism from
the aforementioned GNU project, many of whom also criticized the DMOZ
content license. The content was later released under a Creative
Commons license, which is compatible with the GNU license.
As such, there have been some efforts to provide alternatives to DMOZ.
These alternatives would allow communities of like-minded editors to
set up and maintain their own open source/open content Web
directories.
ChefMoz
======================================================================
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.
Growth
========
From its beginning in 2000 to November 2009 (when it became impossible
for editors to log into the site), ChefMoz had grown to become the
largest global directory of restaurants on the Internet. The total
number of restaurants indexed since 2000 is recorded in the following
table:
Year Number of restaurants
2000 48,000
2001 75,000
2002 179,000
2003 208,000
2004 258,000
2005 266,000
2006 275,000
2007 315,000
2008 325,000
See also
======================================================================
* List of web directories
External links
======================================================================
*
* [https://curlie.org/ Curlie.org] Latest version after dmoz.org
shutdown
License
=========
All content on Gopherpedia comes from Wikipedia, and is licensed under CC-BY-SA
License URL: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/
Original Article: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/dmoz
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