Remember this? (Unless you’ve been reading me since March 2002, you won’t remember it.) Well, now I’m up to this. My first 10k took three years and three months, and my second 10k took four years and nine months. I’m surprised it was that close at all, given that I haven’t edited as much in the past few years as I did in the first few - I even won “Laziest Editor” in fall 2005 - although it’s now easier to do random little edits here and there because I’m a higher-level editor. (I joined in November 1998, became an editall in December 2001, a catmv in May 2002, and a meta in March 2004.)

I’ve never understood the phenomenon of online gambling. It’s a very aggressively marketed industry, as evidenced by the hours I spent cleaning up the Gambling category at ODP several years ago. There was a woman who had the name of a popular online casino tattooed on her forehead (for a surprisingly low $10,000), and you can barely search for information about card games without falling all over online poker sites.

But is online gambling safe? I’m not talking about from a technical standpoint - there are sites like Mac Poker Rooms that help analyze whether a site is trustworthy (though I suspect they also tuck referral codes in there) - but rather from a health standpoint. A couple of months ago, the U.S. Congress voted to make online gambling completely illegal - specifically, credit card companies now cannot collect payments for bets. The Congress presumably did this because gambling of any kind can be addictive, and especially online gambling where you don’t even have to find a casino - you can do it in your jammies and slippers. So I’m not sure that online gambling is really a good idea - I think those who are addiction-prone stand to lose a lot by getting into this. But then again, surely we have the right to do what we want with our money, as long as we pay taxes - right? So why is the government getting involved in the first place?

I hope I’m doing the right thing over at ODP. For several months I have been participating in threads about what should happen to the weblogs category. Many careless edits have been made there in the past, so the category definitely needed help. I figured out that rather than duplicating the entire directory structure within the weblogs category, it would be more appropriate for small weblogs categories to appear throughout the directory. I even started a discussion in a quasi-hidden section of the forum (restricted to those with certain higher privileges), and most of the feedback I got from that thread was quite positive…but minimal. After six weeks with nothing but positive feedback (though again, not much of that), I decided to go ahead and announce the reorganization.

I’m working on it now, and I am scared that I’m screwing things up. I have been working at ODP for longer than most editors - since late 1998 - and I’ve risen high in the ranks with primarily positive comments about me, but I still worry that I’m not doing the right thing. I’m trying to tell myself that I know how the directory works, and that I am being careful to maintain a holistic approach, but I just know there will be editors who will question what I’m doing. I’ve started with a very tiny category to break up - the sports blogs section. I am mostly sending them to “news and media” and “fan pages” sections, because in the case of sports most of these blogs are either news updates or fan pages. And yet part of me still worries.

I wish I could get some other people to help out with the project, but the editors who have been involved in editing there in the past are also known to be controversial, so I’m afraid of asking for their help for fear that they’ll just tell me I’m doing the wrong thing. Other editors who I think would make great assistants on the reorganization project simply don’t know enough about weblogs to understand what to do. (I would venture a guess that I’m one of ODP’s most knowledgable editors when it comes to weblogs.)

I just hope I’m doing the right thing. And even if I’m not, I hope I’m caught early enough that going through my edit history isn’t a huge chore.