Comments on: DMOZ is a waste of (disk) space http://www.billyfire.com/wp/dmoz-is-a-waste-of-disk-space/ Billy Fire LLC - design, marketing and technical commentary Sat, 21 May 2011 05:37:15 +0000 hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.2.1 By: Tom http://www.billyfire.com/wp/dmoz-is-a-waste-of-disk-space/comment-page-1/#comment-2 Tom Sat, 18 Feb 2006 18:58:14 +0000 http://www.billyfire.com/wp/?p=5#comment-2 Compare the Open Directory Project with Wikipedia and you can see the advantages of being truly open. Wikipedia has its detractors--supposedly it is easy to propogate falsehoods, to tarnish reputations, and to corrupt good articles, but Wikipedia has a consistently good standard in the vast majority of articles. Any edits are closely monitored by the millions of users of the freely editable encyclopedia, and anything that is not NPOV (free of bias) is either tagged as such or deleted. In many ways Wikipedia reflects society as a whole. Parts of society can be tricked, false articles can be published in newspapers, movements based on fallacies can surface, but in the end society evens itself out, and the view that is closest to the truth becomes acknowledged as such. The Open Directory Project on the other hand claims to be open, yet it is patently not so. It creates a sort of oligarchy who control which information gets to come into to open. The "project" does not reflect the true nature of the web, because a certain editor may have a tendency not to like flash sites, he may feel that a particular page is insulting to him and must not be indexed or that it threatens one of his interests. Wikipedia threatens the dominance of the old, entrenched media, so it will always be under fire. The Open Directory Project is threatening only to Yahoo, and is beneficial to the old order, hence it will remain in business. Compare the Open Directory Project with Wikipedia and you can see the advantages of being truly open. Wikipedia has its detractors–supposedly it is easy to propogate falsehoods, to tarnish reputations, and to corrupt good articles, but Wikipedia has a consistently good standard in the vast majority of articles.

Any edits are closely monitored by the millions of users of the freely editable encyclopedia, and anything that is not NPOV (free of bias) is either tagged as such or deleted. In many ways Wikipedia reflects society as a whole. Parts of society can be tricked, false articles can be published in newspapers, movements based on fallacies can surface, but in the end society evens itself out, and the view that is closest to the truth becomes acknowledged as such.

The Open Directory Project on the other hand claims to be open, yet it is patently not so. It creates a sort of oligarchy who control which information gets to come into to open. The “project” does not reflect the true nature of the web, because a certain editor may have a tendency not to like flash sites, he may feel that a particular page is insulting to him and must not be indexed or that it threatens one of his interests.

Wikipedia threatens the dominance of the old, entrenched media, so it will always be under fire. The Open Directory Project is threatening only to Yahoo, and is beneficial to the old order, hence it will remain in business.

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