DigitalBeat

Wikipedia is all about words words words. The big arguments at the user-edited encyclopedia are always about the wording of articles — and even a casual user can see that the articles emphasize written over audio or visual content. For those who think that’s a problem, a new web site called Navify wants to deliver a richer Wikipedia experience, with more focus on images, videos and comments. And it just added a continuously-updated list of the most popular articles on Wikipedia, which should appeal to anyone who likes Google Trends.

The data, says co-founder and chief executive Alan Rutledge, comes from Wikipedia itself. There are other all-time or monthly lists of popular Wikipedia articles, but I haven’t seen anything like this, providing the data in something close to real-time. It gives the site the same capabilities. For example, when Rutledge showed me the list last Friday, the top item was “erotic asphyxiation” (the article’s popularity was spurred by the rumors surrounding actor David Carradine’s death). Since then, Navify has started filtering the results to make them more family-friendly, so this morning the top article was “The Beatles.” (What hasn’t changed, however, is the high placement of “Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen.”) The only thing missing on this front is an archive showing past popularity and how it’s changed over time.

The broader vision, meanwhile, is to create a site that changes the way users interact with Wikipedia. If you’re anything like me (or Rutledge), your Wikipedia-browsing experience is often interrupted by visits to other sites. To use a recent personal example, I’ve become fascinated with the band The Magnetic Fields, but after reading the Wikipedia article, I had to do a Google Image Search to find a non-postage-stamp-sized picture of the band, and I had to visit YouTube to see related music videos. Or to use an example from that popular articles list, I would have to visit YouTube or another site to view the movie trailer for Transformers.

With Navify, users can read the articles paired with related Google Images and YouTube videos. They can also vote for the best multimedia content, which gets featured at the top of the video and image pages, and participate in discussions about each article. (Wikipedia has talk pages, but Rutledge says they’re for editors, not readers. I suppose Wikipedia might argue that the whole point is to blur the distinction between the two.) And because Navify also generates a list of related articles, Rutledge says many early users are tapping into the site to find new music.

Navify was recently selected to participate in the fbFund REV program, an incubator funded by Facebook investors Accel Partners and Founders Fund. Rutledge isn’t saying much about the business model yet, but I did ask if there’s a danger in building a site that could become obsolete if Wikipedia itself decides to do a serious redesign. Rutledge noted that the site hasn’t been redesigned for years, and claimed that Wikipedia can’t feature content like YouTube videos because it doesn’t want to be seen as favoring one site over another.

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Tags: co:Navify, inv:accel-partners, inv:fbFund, inv:Founders-Fund, people:Alan-Rutledge