Talk:AboutUs.org

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Articles for deletion This article was nominated for deletion on 3 December 2006. The result of the discussion was no consensus.

Please read my comments and DO the research on GOOGLE! It has 1.4 million references for the AboutUs.org site. Read the articles referenced. The key to Wikipedia is the real time information that is listed. Just as DMOZ is a hugely popular directory, so is AboutUs.org. The only difference- It is Wiki-Style! Please do not snub wiki-style sites especially if they have the goolge search results this does. Plus it is now a criteria no the famous Domaintools.com (Name Intelligence "Whois" search site). Please do not be old fashioned and ruin what makes Wikipedia a wiki- and not a stale non contemporary enclyclopedia! Thanks for doing the research!


  • Strongly Agree with deletion. I am seriously underwhelmed with the site aboutus.org. I can't even figure out how to navigate the "directory" there, except by taking a random walk through "recent changes" pages. As for those Google search results, I got less than 1 million hits, and they appeared to include a lot of sites with "about us" pages. The hits that are truly relevant to this site were primarily (1) items that appear to be self-promotion and (2) items that allege unethical or illegal activity by the website. I see no information value or notability. --orlady 19:18, 2 December 2006 (UTC)
That would make an interesting article, a sort of 'how and why aboutus.org screws' people over. The how seems pretty obvious, but from this article and the few favorable blog reports, it seems the "why" is that he doesn't understand why people wouldn't want their copyrighted work pasted onto a wiki.Cantras 19:53, 2 December 2006 (UTC)

I removed the speedy tag because I don't think this is a clear speedy-deletion candidate. This company has received some press, so if the article gets deleted, it should be via AfD, not just a speedy. Googling for "aboutus.org -site:aboutus.org" gave me 110,000 hits including several news articles in reputable publications that have the site as a primary topic. -GTBacchus(talk) 20:09, 2 December 2006 (UTC)

  • It appears to me that this article should be deleted, based on the same principles and criteria that were applied in the recently concluded discussion Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/web directories. Those other web directories also were discussed in news articles in reputable publications when they were new; the difference is that the articles are no longer online. --orlady 20:17, 2 December 2006 (UTC)
    You may be right, but I'm not sure yet. I think an AfD might be more profitable than a Prod, in the sense of helping to understand consensus on this matter. It seems to me that the site is generating enough "buzz" to warrant an article, but I'm open to being shown otherwise. I acknowledge I'm not the most neutral reviewer, seeing as I was at Ray King's house looking at the website before it was ever launched, and I sometimes contribute there (the site, not his house).
    I've moderated the promotional language of the article, and I'm interested to see whether we can float an acceptable WP article on this subject. -GTBacchus(talk) 20:34, 2 December 2006 (UTC)

GTBacchus, I'm glad you admitted your connection there isntead of trying to hide it. I still strongly agree with deletion of the article as-is, but if it got a hefty section of "why this web-site is not well-liked", I'd take a look and re-vote.Cantras 20:39, 2 December 2006 (UTC)

Why not add the section yourself, if you can find appropriate sources to document it? A website being not well-liked is, of course, no reason for deletion, and if it's so not-well-liked that it receives significant press as a result, then it could be a reason for keeping. I'll be interested to see the AfD on this article, if it gets to that point.
As far as my connection, Ray's a cool guy, but I have no stake in this article staying or going. I would like to see the same standards applied here that are applied to other articles - namely that a topic receiving non-trivial coverage in multiple independent sources counts as "notable". At least I think that's the standard we're supposed to apply, based on the last week of debates at Wikipedia talk:Notability. -GTBacchus(talk) 20:50, 2 December 2006 (UTC)

Upon request I have cleaned up the article, and also added some of the controversial publishings which actually appear to come from only a few sources. This should make the article neutral and enjoyable to read. —The preceding unsigned comment was added by WikiPersonality (talk • contribs) 21:39, December 2, 2006 (UTC).

I have done some additional exploration of this aboutus.org site. I realize that I have encountered it on links from domaintools.com, but I had thought it was a part of the NameIntelligence family of websites (for example, because the "Wiki" pages for expired domains all point to http://www.namemedia.com/about/ ). I had no clue that this was supposed to be a website directory because I did not see any categories. This is not a web directory. (I did finally happen upon some categories, for example http://www.aboutus.org/Category:Springfield ...) What this site seems to be is a collection of bot-scraped information "about" a large number of registered domain names. (By the way, after seeing the information that aboutus.org has copied from a site I own, I understand why so many website owners are offended by this site. Part of my content has been taken out of context and repackaged...) As a website about domains, I see this as a different form of the type of inforamtion found in WHOIS. This is a feature that probably deserves discussion in the WHOIS article (where domaintools is listed as an "external link"), but there is definitely not enough here at this time to merit a stand-alone topic. Delete or merge some content into WHOIS. --orlady 03:41, 3 December 2006 (UTC)

Well, we're practically having an AfD discussion here anyway; why not list it? That'll get some more eyes and opinions too, which is always good. -GTBacchus(talk) 03:48, 3 December 2006 (UTC)
  • Why not start an AfD discussion, you ask? Are you looking at me? I'm not the one who first proposed this for speedy deletion; that was User:WarthogDemon, who began the discussion with a post on User talk:WikiPersonality. I am not thrilled about trying to figure out how to start an AfD -- I'm still enough of a newbie here that I have to search on "AfD" to remember what it stands for. However, I suppose I can try to follow the instructions and start an AfD. --orlady 04:50, 3 December 2006 (UTC)
    I guess I was looking around innocently, when I said that. You seem to have figured out how to do the listing anyway; now we'll see what happens. -GTBacchus(talk) 09:45, 3 December 2006 (UTC)

== My question is to Orlady.. == Why should DMOZ be listed and what makes IT more significant? It is a claimed "Open Directory" with history and high volume of included links. AboutUs.org is automated, and NOT closed to any site becuase it does not have the constraints of manual labor and will. It is merely newer! (But not unused, untested, or irrelevant in google searches, or articles) Please do a detailed view of the Alexa ranking on the site to see the rapidity of it's popularity. In other words, to delete AboutUs.org one should have to justify keeping DMOZ because the differences are simply automation and age, not purpose or popularity which are similar.

  • This isn't and never will be about DMOZ. Delete. Plenty of automated news or other content repackagers are out there (splogs anybody?), and probably none should get an entry. kctipton 01:34, 4 December 2006 (UTC)

Information (not that it's actually relevant to notability): Today when I googled "aboutus.org", the results pages included fewer than 300 hits in total, although the first page header says "Results 1 - 100 of about 1,010,000 for aboutus.org". It appears that almost all of the hits are blogs and online forums. http://nextnetnews.blogspot.com/2006/11/aboutusorg-lands-1m.html lists the investors who put up the $1M and says "The site’s traffic after only a few months is one of its primary selling points." --orlady 21:28, 4 December 2006 (UTC)

[edit] notability

I'm not for or against that website, but clearly it has been in the spotlight for quite a while, and has been referenced by the largest registrars in the whois response. I don't think it could be considered irrelevant anymore, regardless of its ethics and unusability. --grin ✎ 14:41, 30 March 2007 (UTC)

Just 96 unique Google hits -- heck, even I get more than that. Can I get a Wikipedia entry, too? --A. B. (talk) 13:49, 3 April 2007 (UTC)
On further examination, I see Yahoo has 1000s of results searching on aboutus.org - site:aboutus.org. Many aren't very useful, but this makes me think Google is penalizing aboutus.org for search engine spamming. --A. B. (talk) 15:40, 3 April 2007 (UTC)
The Portland Business Journal was used to establish notability -- is it notable enough itself to use for this purpose? --A. B. (talk) 13:54, 3 April 2007 (UTC)
TechCrunch is cited and it is definitely a notable site per WP:WEB but does it meet the requirements to be used as a reliable source to prove notability for AboutUs.org per WP:WEB? See these sections of "Reliable Sources":
  • On the one hand:
  • On the other, see this subsection of the "Self-published sources" section:
    • "Exceptions", which opens with "there are a few specific situations in which a self-published source can be considered reliable"
      • The rest of this proceeds in a murky "maybe, maybe not" tone:
        • "When a well-known, professional researcher writing within his or her field of expertise, or a well-known professional journalist, has produced self-published material, these may be acceptable as sources, so long as his or her work has been previously published by credible, third-party publications. Editors should exercise caution for two reasons: first, if the information on the professional researcher's blog (or self-published equivalent) is really worth reporting, a reliable source will probably have covered it; secondly, the information has been self-published, which means it has not been subject to independent fact-checking."
Others' thoughts? --A. B. (talk) 15:31, 3 April 2007 (UTC)
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