1. Ask
You write a question in your own words — English, Hindi, or any language you can type — or pick a topic.
How it works
How Veridell works
Four steps, no black box. The article breakdown is built from sentences a Wikipedia editor wrote and Veridell quotes. Chat is different: an AI model explains the selected source passages and must mark every claim with a numbered citation.
2. Research
Veridell queries the Wikipedia search API, resolves your question to the article that fits best, and pulls the full article and its metadata.
3. Filter
The article is cleaned — navigation boxes, edit links and footnote markers dropped — then split into a lead and topic sections, and its sentences are scored against your question.
4. Understand
You get a direct answer, key points, a topic-wise breakdown, the infobox as facts, and every source with a link back to Wikipedia.
Which APIs are used
- Wikipedia Action API — search, article parsing, sections, random articles, prefix suggestions, plain-text extracts.
- Wikipedia REST API — page summaries, related articles, the On this day feed, featured content.
- Wikimedia pageviews API — the "most read right now" list.
- Wikidata — structured facts behind a topic.
- Wikimedia Commons — image credits and licences.
All of these are public and keyless, and search requests go straight from your browser to Wikimedia. When AI chat is used, the question and the selected source excerpts are sent to the same-origin /api/ask Pages Function, which calls the configured OpenRouter model or the Cloudflare Workers AI binding. Credentials stay on the server and are never sent to the browser.
How sentences are chosen
The default ranker is a keyword overlap score: each word in your question is weighted by how rare it is across the article, and sentences that match are scored higher. A sentence containing a date or a number, and one that opens a paragraph, get a small bonus. The optional Understand meaning switch instead loads a small open sentence-embedding model (about 23 MB, once) and re-orders the same sentences by cosine similarity to your question. Either way, the sentences themselves are never rewritten.
What Veridell never does
- It never presents a model's guess as a sourced fact. The article breakdown quotes source sentences; chat answers must cite the passage behind each claim, and the sources stay visible under every answer.
- It does not keep your questions on Veridell's side. Bookmarks, history and saved chat answers live in your own browser storage; when chat AI is used the question and selected excerpts are processed by the configured provider.
- It does not track you, sell data, or show advertising.
- It does not claim to be affiliated with the Wikimedia Foundation.
Licences
Wikipedia article text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike Licence (CC BY-SA 4.0). Wikidata data is released under CC0 1.0. Files on Wikimedia Commons carry their own licence, shown with each image. Reuse must respect those terms.