AboutUs

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Revision as of 22:21, 16 July 2007 by MarkDilley (talk | contribs) (mangled it up, need to come back and fix...)
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[{{{URL}}} {{{logo}}}] [{{{URL}}} AboutUs]
[{{{recentchanges URL}}} Recent changes]
[No WikiNode]
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Founded by:
Status: [[:Category:{{{status}}}|{{{status}}}]]
Language: [[:Category:Wiki {{{language}}}|{{{language}}}]]
Edit mode: [[:Category:{{{editmode}}}|{{{editmode}}}]]
Wiki engine: [[:Category:{{{engine}}}|{{{engine}}}]]
Wiki license: [[:Category:Wiki {{{license}}}|{{{license}}}]]
Main topic: [[:Category:{{{maintopic}}}|{{{maintopic}}}]]

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. That was quickly fixed and efforts are ongoing to revert the edits that are in conflict. 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).

Wiki Pages

The wiki has over 6,000,000 articles, most of them about websites, due to the fact that the bot the website owns automatically creates most of them.