AboutUs

[{{{URL}}} {{{logo}}}]	[{{{URL}}} AboutUs] [{{{recentchanges URL}}} Recent changes] [No WikiNode] [No About] [No Mobile URL]
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Description

AboutUs is a wiki of websites that anyone can edit. It is currently in Beta.

Wiki size:

unknown size

Criticism

AboutUs has been criticized for stealing private information from websites. The website has a bot which scrapes information from a website and uses it to make a starter AboutUs wiki page. The initial seeding of the wiki had a bot that disregarded websites protected by a robots.txt. Websites are still vulnerable due to the fact that the wiki encourages AboutUs users to add information about the website to it.

Response

AboutUs uses publicly available information to create a starter wiki page on every website that is searched for on its system. (after the initial 2+ million seeding) Unlike weblogs, or the whois system, it is very easy to change or request removal of information (from the history).

The initial seeding of the wiki had a bot that disregarded websites protected by a robots.txt. That was quickly fixed and efforts are ongoing to revert the edits that are in conflict.

It is a bit jarring to people who are not used to an open edit internet, that anyone, anywhere can write about them or the things they care about in such a manner. I suppose it was also jarring to people when weblogs exploded on the scene.

Wiki Pages

The wiki has about 3,000,000 articles, most of them about websites, due to the fact that the bot the website owns automatically creates most of them.