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