AskMeNow is now commencing the planned alpha test of the AskWiki search site
of Wikipedia content under their agreement with the Wikimedia Foundation.
AskWiki is a preliminary integration of a semantic search engine that seeks
to provide specific answers to questions using information from Wikipedia
articles. Whatever the question - Why is the Sky Blue? What is quantum
physics? - just ask and get the answer.
The site is still in early stage development and has been designed to foster
community involvement to help improve the search service and interface over
the development period. Like Wikipedia, AskWiki is built on MediaWiki and
gives individual contributors the ability to improve search results by
editing and updating answer articles. This makes it a great complementary
tool for Wikipedia and will continue to reside on an off-site portal. If the
test period is successful, we will develop AskWiki into a mobile search tool
that will allow users to access Wikipedia through an easy mobile service.
However, since the project is still an in-development test, we are asking
the Wikimedia Community to try it out and help us improve it.
Please visit
www.askwiki.com, and help us make search results smarter.
Thanks,
The AskWiki Team