DMOZ

History and Background - DMOZ was founded in the United States as Gnuhoo by Rich Skrenta and Bob Truel in 1998. - Chris Tolles, Bryn Dole, and Jeremy Wenokur also joined as co-founders. - Gnuhoo was later renamed to NewHoo after objections from Richard Stallman and the Free Software Foundation. - Netscape Communications Corporation acquired NewHoo in October 1998 and it became the Open Directory Project. - AOL acquired Netscape and DMOZ became one of its assets. - DMOZ was launched in November/December 2000 as a project of the Open Directory Project (ODP). Size and Growth - DMOZ had about 100,000 URLs indexed and contributions from 4,500 editors when Netscape took over. - The number of URLs indexed reached one million on October 5, 1999. - DMOZ had 5,169,995 sites listed in over 1,017,500 categories as of April 2013. - The directory reached four million listings on December 3, 2003. - In October 2015, there were 3,996,412 sites listed in 1,026,706 categories. System Failure and Editing Outage - DMOZ experienced a catastrophic server failure on October 20, 2006. - Editors were unable to work on the directory until December 18, 2006. - During the outage, an older build of the directory was visible to the public. - Site suggestion and update listings forms became available again on January 13, 2007. - RDF dumps resumed publication on January 26, 2007. Competing and Spinoff Projects - Two other major web directories edited by volunteers, sponsored by Go.com and Zeal, emerged but are now defunct. - MusicMoz, ChefMoz, and Open Site were open content volunteer projects inspired by DMOZ. - DMOZ also served as inspiration for the Nupedia project, which eventually led to the creation of Wikipedia. - These directories did not license their content for open content distribution. Maintenance and Policies - Editors maintained directory listings by adding new listings, editing existing listings, and monitoring linked sites. - Robozilla, a Web crawler, checked the status of listed sites and flagged those that had moved or disappeared. - The goal was to reduce link rot in web directories. - Expired domains listed on DMOZ attracted domain hijacking, so they were regularly removed. - Volunteers created editing tools like linkcheckers and spellcheckers to supplement Robozilla. - DMOZ editors go through an application process and demonstrate their editing abilities. - Editors start with permissions in a small category and can apply for more privileges. - Mentorship relationships and internal forums support new editors. - Senior editors can be granted additional privileges based on experience and leadership. - Violations of DMOZ's Editing Guidelines can result in consequences for editors.