14 DAY TRIAL // A few weeks back, we discovered WikiWand, a tool that can turn Wikipedia’s website into a place you actually like to visit because it completely transforms the entire interface.
Now that the app has been officially launched after several weeks in Beta, we can share this great find, especially as the developers behind the project are also happy to announce that they managed to raise $600,000 (€448,000) from the prominent angel investor Saar Wilf, who will now serve as chairman of the board.
Not only is WikiWand a pretty awesome project, but it also wants to help out Wikipedia. In fact, down the road WikiWant wants to integrate contextually relevant ads for textbooks, articles and even courses and will donate 30 percent of the proceeds to Wikipedia.
This means that, if you use the app, you’ll inadvertently be donating money to Wikipedia, the world’s largest encyclopedia that sometimes seeks donations from its pages. Even though it won’t exactly be a fortune, Wikipedia’s budget would still increase, which is a good thing.
“It didn't make sense to us that the 5th most popular website in the world, used by half a billion people, has an interface that hasn't been updated in over a decade,” says Lior Grossman, the company's co-founder & CEO. “That's the reason we created WikiWand, because we believe that consuming knowledge should be fun and easy.”
WikiWand is an extension that can be downloaded for Chrome, Firefox or Safari. Once installed, every time you visit a Wikipedia article, you’ll notice the sleek new interface. The title of the page is bolded and comes at in a larger font, while photos appear on the right side or even at the top, as a banner.
The entire table of contents gets transferred to the left area of the screen, in a special panel that is fixed, meaning that you won’t have to scroll up and down through the long posts to go back to the table of contents every time you want to check out some topic that was somewhere lower on the page.
These appear by section and subsection and you’ll be able to scan them all. If your screen isn’t that big and you want to use more of your screen, you can always make the side bar disappear by clicking on the three lines in the corner.
From the ribbon at the top of the screen, you can share the article to Facebook, Google+, Twitter or Gmail. You can also change the language you’re looking at pages in.
Furthermore, while reading an article, you’ll be able to hover your mouse over the various links each article is peppered with and see a preview to that particular article in a box that appears on the screen. From there, you can choose to read the full article or move on.
Over the weekend, we'll be running an interview with the WikiWand CEO.
