Wikipedia is another widely used reference website. However, you will find that in competive categories, only certain websites will be listed, all others will be deleted, even though they may be having better content.
You are not even allowed to add dissenting opinion on a particular topic.
It appears that there is a secret mailing list which bans users and the administrators are more involved in corruption.
The corruption of DMOZ editors is well known among webmasters for many years now. Including a website in certain categories has a price, and the more competitive or commercial the DMOZ category, the higher the price.
Unfortunately, search engines like Google , assign a lot of weightage to DMOZ listing in the factors that determine a website’s ranking in the search engines.
A blog post on DMOZ extortion . The comments are insightful.
If you own a popular website, to rank well in search engines and get a lot of free traffic, your website must be listed with the so called authority websites like DMOZ and Wikipedia.
If only the merit of your website and its usefulness to the end user was the criteria, these websites would certain deserve their reputation. How many of the editors of these websites are corrupt and have their own agenda , while promoting or discarding other websites and news stories.
The persons who are really exploited are the genuine volunteers, who spend their time, without expecting any thing in return.