The UK 200,000 Club
By laigh
Many things have happened over the last year in ODP and the Regional/Europe/United Kingdom category is no exception. There has been much work done from creating new categories to cleaning up those already available. At the beginning of December it was noticed that the amount of sites listed in Regional/Europe/United Kingdom numbered 196,699. This meant that it would take another 3301 sites to be listed to achieve the wonderful amount of 200,000 listed sites and hence the UK 200,000 Club was born. This was an effort to make the 200,000 listed sites by the turn of the year, 31st December 2007.
The "numbers game" is not one played by editors in any serious way. Quality of sites that are presented on ODP is always the top priority but some times a little fun can allow us to focus directly on specific categories once in a while. The thought of adding over 3000 sites in about 30 days may not seem like a very large amount but if you consider what it takes to list a site in the directory you may think slightly differently. Different sites take different lengths of time to review. It can take 5 minutes to review some and it can take up to an hour to review others. If we take it that it takes an average of 10 minutes per site, this starts to show the enormity of the task that was undertaken. It was a task that was to take about 550 hours of constant editing with an edit every 10 minutes.
With the effort of many editors listed in Regional/Europe/United Kingdom and some editors that have directory wide permissions, we managed to get to our target on 28/12/07 at 20.36hrs. This was a great day and we all felt that we had been part of a great team effort and a worthwhile project. This had lead to the further project of the UK ¼ Million Club where we hope to reach 250,000 by the end of 2009.
I have also been involved in a further project within Regional/Europe/United Kingdom. I took on the task of upgrading the category that dealt with the Scottish Highlands. When I started to look at this category it contained just over 1000 listed sites and about 40 specific localities.
The Scottish Highlands is a huge area. The actual area covered is 30,659 km² which is larger than many counties in places like Texas. The battle with this category was to allow sites to be listed but to also allow users to be able to follow its structure and find what they needed. We created a middle category which links directly to the localities to allow the users to see whereabouts they are in relation to this large area.
At present we now have over 260 separate localities listed in this category and well over 3300 sites. This is still an on going project and we welcome more suggestions for it but we are fairly proud of the achievements so far and looking forward to expanding it more.