In some categories there are large numbers of suggestions awaiting review. An editor faced with possibly several hundred sites, ….

CORRECTED : 1 Dec 2005 - as a comment says - more typically for busy active editors - more like several thousand

…. and a limited amount of time and wanting to review and accept a couple that day has no easy way of telling which are bad and which are good.

Now many assume that we should review in order of submission, that somehow that is fair. But this is not like the local donut shop, where of course, it would only be reasonable to deal with customers in the order in whcih they came in the door. Because, as has been said many times, DMOZ is not a service provided to site owners, it’s an attempt to provide a good list of sites. However, in fact, many editors will decide to review in date order, if they can find no better way, since it’s easy to do that.

But in reality, we should review and accept the best sties first. But that’s difficult, since you have to review all the sites to find which one is best.

Consider, that you want to find the best donut in the city. The only way to do that is eat one of every type of donut from each store, but the side effects of this can be disastrous. So in fact, one must pick and choose, by looking at the ones that seem to be most promising, and then sampling a few of those.

Likewise, an editor cannot consider reviewing all sites, he must pick ones that seem to be most promising. That is why in many cases, sites suggested with well-written descriptions, and correctly formed title, tend to be reviewed ahead of others. There is probably a good correlation to the quality of a site and the care taken to make a good submssion.