Yellowikis

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Yellowikis is a MediaWiki website 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.

Some users also enter a number of codes including a two letter country code as well as a Standard Industrial Classification, International Standard Industry Code and North American Industry Classification System. Some users are also adding geo codes and Skype ids.

Yellowikis was launched in January 2005. As of February 2006, the Yellowikis main page had been translated into more than 20 different languages.

[edit] Legal issues

A commercial business listing company Yell ^[1] wants the founders of Yellowikis Mr Paul Youlten and Rosa Blaus to shut down the site claiming that Yellowikis is "passing itself off" as being associated with Yell.com and that people will confuse the two organisations. ^[2] This might be considered to be anti-competitive. 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.^[3]

However, a European court has already ruled that the two-word phrase "Yellow Pages", when used within Europe, cannot be considered the property of a single company. This might be seen as a demonstration of poor trademark registration rules, rather than an attempt at "passing off". Since "yellow pages" is a phrase used around the world to differentiate commercial listings from "white pages", non-commercial listings, it is almost universally treated as a genericized trademark that has long since passed into the public domain.

From 9 October 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, however, 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.