Type of site MediaWiki Website yellowikis.wikia.com Launched 2005 | Owner Wikia Registration Optional Current status Inactive | |
Yellowikis was a MediaWiki website collecting basic information about businesses. This information included basic contact details such as company name, address, websites, and telephone numbers, as well as internal Yellowiki wikilinks to competitors. Yellowikis was launched in January 2005. As of March 2011, the Yellowikis main page had been translated into more than 25 different languages.
Some users also entered a number of codes including a two letter country code as well as an International Standard Industrial Classification, North American Industry Classification or US Standard Industrial Classification. Some users are also adding geocodes and Skype ids.
Legal issues
A commercial business listing company, Yell Limited, requested that the founders of Yellowikis, Paul Youlten and Rosa Blaus, amend their site, claiming that Yellowikis was "passing itself off" as being associated with Yell.com and that people would confuse the two organisations. This might be considered to be anti-competitive behaviour/anti-competitive in the eyes of certain commentators, however, such claim is unlikely to carry water from a legal perspective. Yell's claim is given considerable weight by the slogan on Yellowiki's front page that they are "Yellow Pages for the 21st Century" although in their public protestations, Yellowikis claim that they are not trying to create association between themselves and Yellow Pages.
Yellow Pages is a registered trade mark in many countries including the UK. In some territories, however, the mark has lost its distinctiveness as a source of origin of goods and services.
From 9 to 14 October 2006, the domain address redirected to the new Owikis website, which stated "The trademark dispute between Yell Limited and Paul Youlten concerning the Yellowikis website has been satisfactorily resolved".
On 15 October 2006, the Yellowikis website reappeared, with the explanation that United Kingdom users would have to use Owikis, with the word Yell from the domain name and the color yellow from the logo; international users could continue to use Yellowikis. As of May 2008, the Owikis site is not yet available.
As of at least May 2014, the Wikia page is dead.