AboutUs

Description
AboutUs is a wiki of  that anyone can edit. It is currently in Beta. AboutUs encourages people to register with their Real Names

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 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 over 13,000,000 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

 * Wikidweb is another wiki that discusses the web as a whole.
 * Whoisbehind also discusses the web as a whole.
 * Quarkbase is another wiki that discusses the web as a whole, with one page per website.
 * WebsiteWiki is a similar wiki in German, focused on German sites