Yellowikis

» see yellowikis.org as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

In 2005 I was in the middle of an engineering degree and using Wikipedia the way everybody used it, as a machine for settling arguments. It never once occurred to me to ask what Wikipedia was throwing away. A fifteen year old in the UK asked, and the answer she got is the reason this site existed at all.

Rosa Blaus noticed that the small businesses she looked up kept getting deleted for not being encyclopedic, which was and still is the correct call for Wikipedia and a useless one for anybody trying to find a plumber. She told her father, Paul Youlten, that those entries needed somewhere else to go. Yellowikis launched in January 2005.

It was a MediaWiki install pointed at companies instead of subjects. Each listing carried the contact details you would expect, and the interesting part was the wikilinks, because you could link a company straight to its competitors. Contributors started adding industry classification codes by hand, then geocodes and Skype IDs on top of them.

The slogan on the front page was Yellow Pages for the 21st Century. That was accurate as a description of the product. It was also the sentence that started the trouble.

~ the case file ~

~ the fight ~

In July 2006, Yell Limited, which publishes the Yellow Pages in the UK, sent legal demands to Youlten and Blaus. The claims were passing off and misrepresentation, and the demand floated the idea that the domain names amounted to an instrument of fraud. What Yell wanted was the site closed and the domain names handed over, with damages on top.

The size difference got quoted everywhere at the time and it deserves to be. Yell's revenue in 2005 was 2.4 billion dollars. Yellowikis had recorded a loss of five hundred dollars, which was what it had spent printing T-shirts for the Wikimania conference in Frankfurt. The BBC covered it and the Guardian ran it under a headline about a teenager facing legal action, and none of the coverage was kind to the phone book company.

It settled. Between 9 and 14 October 2006 the domain redirected to a new site called Owikis, carrying a notice that the trademark dispute had been satisfactorily resolved. Yellowikis came back on 15 October under a split arrangement: UK visitors were sent to Owikis, which had no yell in the name and no yellow in the logo, while everybody else carried on using Yellowikis. Winning a fight like that and having to repaint the logo anyway is roughly what winning looks like when the other side has 2.4 billion dollars.

~ the long tail ~

The wiki moved onto Wikia, which is now Fandom, and carried on quietly for years. By March 2011 the main page had been translated into more than twenty five languages, which for a volunteer-run business directory is a real number. The original domain had already stopped serving the site by 2008 and sat on a hosting placeholder.

The last archived copy of the Wikia main page that actually loads is dated 9 January 2014. By the end of May that year the address was answering with a redirect, and it has never answered with anything else since. Nobody wrote a shutdown notice. A wiki does not shut down. It stops being edited, and then one day the host stops serving it.

What killed it was not Yell. It was Google putting opening hours and a map pin directly into the results page, and Facebook giving every shop a free page it could update itself. Volunteers were never going to out-maintain either of those. The idea was right and the labor model was wrong, which is the same sentence you can write over most of the open directories from that decade. yellowikis.org still resolves today. It serves a betting app in Russian.

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