AboutUs

AboutUs Recent changes • WikiNode • About • [No Mobile URL]
Founded by:	unknown
Status:	Active
Language:	Multilingual
Edit mode:	LoginToEdit
Wiki engine:	MediaWiki
Wiki license:	Multi-license
Main topic:	Directory

AboutUs earlier beta logo

Wiki size:

28,739,286 article pages see stats

(As of: 2022-09-22)

Description

AboutUs is a wiki site of websites that originally, anyone could edit. Previously in Beta, AboutUs encourages people to register with their real names. The AboutUs wiki is powered by the ever-popular MediaWiki software, and is rendered by a fresh custom skin.[1] In terms of licensing, all editable content is made available under the terms of two licenses: those being the GNU Free Documentation License (GNU FDL, or more commonly GFDL), and / or the Creative Commons Attribution Share Alike 3.0 (CC-BY-SA 3.0). However, all non-editable content, together with all content in the 'Learn' section are copyright AboutUs. AboutUs point out the importance of attribution – when re-published, it must include a link back to the original article.[2]

Ward Cunningham was the chief technology officer at AboutUs from 2009 to 2011.

Criticism

AboutUs has been criticized for displaying public whois data information from websites. The website has a bot which scrapes information from a website, and uses it to make a starter page on the AboutUs wiki site. The initial seeding of the wiki had a bot that disregarded websites protected by a robots.txt. That was quickly fixed and efforts were 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 additional 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).

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

As of February 2018, the AboutUs wiki has over 28,000,000 wiki pages according to our stats page, which obviously needs to be honed down a bit: stats. Only about 983,674 have been edited, but that does not mean the pages that have not been edited cannot be edited.

Related wiki sites

• Wikidweb — was another wiki site that discussed the web as a whole, dead since mid-2018
• WhoIsBehind.org — also discusses the web as a whole
• WebsiteWiki — is a similar wiki in German, focused on German sites

External links

• AboutUs — at WikiApiary.com (founded 2011), the wiki site for detailed information on all MediaWiki-powered websites