Open Directory Project 156
17,000 listings.[40]
Early in the history of the ODP, its staff gave representatives of selected companies, such as Rolling Stone or CNN,
editing access in order to list individual pages from their websites.[41] Links to individual CNN articles have been
added until 2004 and have been entirely removed from the directory in January 2008[42] due to being outdated and
not considered worth the effort to maintain. Such experiments have not been repeated later.Ownership and management
Underlying some controversy surrounding ODP is its ownership and management. Some of the original GnuHoo
volunteers felt that they had been deceived into joining a commercial enterprise.[3] To varying degrees, those
complaints have continued up until the present.
At ODP's inception, there was little thought given to the idea of how ODP should be managed and there were no
official forums, guidelines or FAQs. In essence, ODP began as a free for all.[43]
As time went on, the ODP Editor Forums became the de facto ODP parliament and when one of ODP's staff
members would post an opinion in the forums, it would be considered an official ruling.[27] Even so, ODP 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 ODP editors, with ODP's
paid staff having the final say regarding ODP's policies and procedures.[28][44]
Robert Keating, a principal of Touchstone Consulting Group in Washington, D.C. since 2006, has worked as AOL's
Program Manager for ODP since 2004. He started working for AOL in 1999 as Senior Editor for AOL Search, then
as Managing Editor, AOL Search, ODP, and then as Media Ecosystem Manager, AOL Product Marketing.[45][46]Editor removal procedures
ODP's editor removal procedures are overseen by ODP's staff and meta editors. According to ODP'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 ODP's staff
and meta editors. Volunteer editors who are being discussed are not given notice that such proceedings are taking
place.[44] Some people find this arrangement distasteful, wanting instead a discussion modelled more like a trial held
in the U.S. judicial system.[47]
In the article Editor Removal Explained, ODP meta editor Arlarson states that "a great deal of confusion about the
removal of editors from ODP results from false or misleading statements by former editors".[48]
The ODP's confidentiality guidelines prohibit any current ODP editors in a position to know anything from
discussing the reasons for specific editor removals.[44] However, a generic list of reasons is for example given in the
guidelines.[49] In the past, this has led to removed ODP editors wondering why they cannot login at ODP to perform
their editing work.[50][51]