Push on Those Greens

By cherel

The "Pushon" thread, short for Push on Those Greens, began in March 2004 with a discussion about needing approximately 2,500 sites in the United States category to top 600,000. "Greens" is the name given to various types of unreviewed sites:

Sites suggested by people outside of ODP

Update requests from people outside ODP

Sites suggested by other editors within ODP

Sites that were unreviewed by editors or tools doing quality control

Sites that editors have stored in the unreviewed queue for various other reasons

At first, some Editors worked on Greens and posted updates to report their progress. It was a roller coaster ride for many months-- making gains over several months, only to have them erased when the webcrawler, Robozilla, made a pass through Regional removing sites that didn't respond-- marking them as "Reds" (errors). While Robozilla's work was discouraging to the Editors involved, ODP had to do this periodic housecleaning to remove non-working sites and keep ODP user-friendly. Other quality-control specialists, seejay, tschild, plantrob, and brmehlman, also weeded non-working sites from ODP. However, with dedication and perseverance, the Pushon team forged ahead. Some major participants in the earliest days of the Pushon thread were: peril, lissa, and ps653. Major discussions at that time concerned the total number of sites in ODP for the US, and specific states that needed help.

In December 2005 the total number of sites in the United States category was still close to where it was when the Pushon thread started. ps653 made frequent reports listing states where the most progress had been made clearing reds and greens. In April 2006 we finally hit our 600k goal-- for about three days, when Robozilla came through again.... We passed 600k sites for the second time in September 2006.

In August 2007, spectregunner started posting a weekly list of the states, their current number of sites, and their ranking in United States. Beginning with his second report he included each state's gain/loss from the previous week, and added notes to show which states:

Had the greatest gain/loss for the week.
Gained or lost in the rankings.
Joined or left the "5K club" (over 5,000 sites in ODP).
Joined or left the "10K club" (over 10,000 sites in ODP).

In September 2007 cherel took over posting the weekly report in the Pushon thread, adding:

Canada's provinces to the list.
A current count of reds for each state and province.
Dates when all the reds for a state or province had been reviewed.

The Pushon thread won an End of Year 2007 Mozzie for the Best Team Editing Project.

Since the Pushon project started, we've increased the number of sites in the United States category from about 595,000 to over 615,000, with another 78,000+ sites now in the Canada category. In just the last six months:

Kentucky joined the 10K club.
Kansas went from 4,666 sites to 6,181 sites, a 32% increase.
Both Indiana and West Virginia rose four places in the United States category.

To date, the Pushon reports were generated with a spreadsheet, using an ASCII editor or a simple program to extract the raw data from the Regional ODP web page. Plantrob is working on a general-purpose gauntlets-like tool that will generate the report in a semi-automated fashion, so that other branches can do the same if they wish. We've also been discussing changing the name of the thread to something like "Build the Directory", to better reflect what we are trying to do.