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Qwiki seems like something that's easy to prototype but hard to do well. And it seems like a product that you have to do well to monetize.

Take the Qwiki entry on polyamory, for example: http://www.qwiki.com/q/#!/Polyamory

Qwiki pronounces it wrong, which means it actually decreases the value of the information it is regurgitating from Wikipedia.




That's a fairly good example of a failure, really:

>The most common symbol is the red and white heart combined with the blue infinity sign[.] Therefore, [the California SSM ruling] legitimizes polygamy and polyamory.

The first sentence, which is missing a period but it pauses on like it exists (correctly so), goes with their picture of a purple, upside-down, half-twist-on-each-side triangle. Whups.

The second sentence makes no sense in context.

I wonder if they pull phonetic information from Wikipedia. If they do, then polyamory wouldn't benefit from it, as it has no phonetic pronunciation there. If they don't, they probably get a lot of foreign-origin words more incorrect than we're seeing right away.

edit: Another odd pronunciation: http://www.qwiki.com/q/#!/.sch

>www...sch.uk

is a) incorrectly written, and b) pronounced "w-w-w [long pause....] s-c-h-uck". (letters, followed by "yuck" minus the y). And the "contents" tab is failing to load for me.




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