Yellowikis
Encyclopedia
Yellowikis is a MediaWiki
MediaWiki
MediaWiki is a popular free web-based wiki software application. Developed by the Wikimedia Foundation, it is used to run all of its projects, including Wikipedia, Wiktionary and Wikinews. Numerous other wikis around the world also use it to power their websites...

 website
Website
A website, also written as Web site, web site, or simply site, is a collection of related web pages containing images, videos or other digital assets. A website is hosted on at least one web server, accessible via a network such as the Internet or a private local area network through an Internet...

 collecting basic information about businesses. This information includes 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. , the Yellowikis main page had been translated into more than 25 different languages.

Some users also enter a number of codes including a two letter country code as well as an International Standard Industrial Classification
International Standard Industrial Classification
The International Standard Industrial Classification of All Economic Activities is a United Nations system for classifying economic data. The United Nations Statistics Division describes it in the following terms:...

, North American Industry Classification or US Standard Industrial Classification
Standard Industrial Classification
The Standard Industrial Classification is a United States government system for classifying industries by a four-digit code. Established in 1937, it is being supplanted by the six-digit North American Industry Classification System , which was released in 1997; however certain government...

. Some users are also adding geocode
Geocode
GEOCODE is a standardized all-natural number representation format specification for geospatial coordinate measurements that provide details of the exact location of geospatial point at, below, or above the surface of the earth at a specified moment of time.Geocode is patented under US Patents...

s and Skype
Skype
Skype is a software application that allows users to make voice and video calls and chat over the Internet. Calls to other users within the Skype service are free, while calls to both traditional landline telephones and mobile phones can be made for a fee using a debit-based user account system...

 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
Yellow Pages
Yellow Pages refers to a telephone directory of businesses, organized by category, rather than alphabetically by business name and in which advertising is sold. As the name suggests, such directories were originally printed on yellow paper, as opposed to white pages for non-commercial listings...

 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
United Kingdom
The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern IrelandIn the United Kingdom and Dependencies, other languages have been officially recognised as legitimate autochthonous languages under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages...

 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. , the Owikis site is not yet available.

Further reading

  • Yell threatens to shut down Yellowikis from Wikinews
    Wikinews
    Wikinews is a free-content news source wiki and a project of the Wikimedia Foundation. The site works through collaborative journalism. Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales has distinguished Wikinews from Wikipedia by saying "on Wikinews, each story is to be written as a news story as opposed to an...

    , 2006-07-05
The source of this article is wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.  The text of this article is licensed under the GFDL.
 
x
OK