Damned if I wasn't thinking about this sort of
thing a couple hours
ago while washing up...the vision I had was a device in the home which
would respond to queries, so one could ask, "Wikipedia, how long is
the Great Wall of China", and get an audible response within a
reasonable response time.
That is more or less the extent of the thought, and while there are a
lot of questions and issues to be resolved around it, I see no reason
it couldn't become a reality within a few years.
SemanticWiki would be a key feature in making that idea a reality.
Parsing the plain text articles can only provide very limited data for
answering such questions.