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GNU

On several spoken articles that I have heard, they always say its protected under the GNU license. Only when they pronounce GNU, they say it wrong. They pronounce it as G-N-U. It is pronounced guh-noo. (pronounced /gnu/ⓘ), approximately like canoe. (The GNU Operating System, retrieved 2007-07-12) I don't know how many people are aware of that..But its really nice that they are vocalizing the articles. :) Thanks ✬Dillard421✬ (talk • contribs) 02:55, 13 July 2007 (UTC)

pronouncing each letter is not incorrect. It is interchangeable, and some prefer it, as it makes clear to the audience that an acronym is being used. CB Droege 17:16, 13 July 2007 (UTC)
Ah I hadnt realized that it was interchangeable, i can see how if you were speaking that it might make it more clear. But then again you say the link anyways after you say GNU. ✬Dillard421✬ (talk • contribs) 03:28, 15 July 2007 (UTC)

Spoken articles in Japanese ?

I have been using the Spanish spoken articles to learn Spanish, it was a great help to get the sounds and accent of this language !! Now I am learning Japanese but I couldn't find the spoken articles in Japanese :-( On the Spoken_articles category page there are links to 16 other languages but no Japanese. I tried to look for a similar page but did not find anything. Does anybody have an idea where the Japanese spoken articles might be ? Thanks a lot !!! Nicolas1981 23:22, 16 July 2007 (UTC)

Learning the hard way

I suppose I should've read the guidelines for recording before jumping in, specifically what to read and what not to read. After spending twelve minutes reading the references, editing the subsequent recording, and all the while wondering, "Why the hell would anyone want this information read aloud?" I found the answer. They don't. Hrmph. In any case, the Starcraft article should be done by tomorrow. Need to record an introduction and a generic "The article and blah blah blah licensed under blah blah bah," thing to put on the end, but that's about it. Consequentially 13:22, 23 July 2007 (UTC)

The West Wing

The audio file for The West Wing, recorded by User:Rebelguys2, was for the page as it was in December 2005. In July 2006, I put in a request for the audio file to be updated, my rationale was "The audio file for this page was done in December 2005 and a lot has changed since then. As the show is now off the air, it is unlike that this page will change radically, so would it be possible for the audio file be updated to a more definitive version of the page." The {{Spoken Wikipedia request}} template is still there, where I put it over a year ago, but the audio file has not been updated. --Philip Stevens 14:45, 23 July 2007 (UTC)

This project doesn't have a very high output rate, and most participants seem to prefer recording articles they choose rather than those from the request list. The most effective solution I can suggest is for you to record it yourself :-) -SCEhardT 19:26, 23 July 2007 (UTC)
Yeah I thought of that, but I don't have the most pleasing voice in the world. Also I'm British and although my accent would give the audio file a sophisticated twang, I am mindful that this is about a US television series. --Philip Stevens 20:27, 24 July 2007 (UTC)

Questions

I hope to record some articles, but I've run into a few issues:

  1. Should I include hatnotes?
  2. Should I let exclamation marks change my intonation? (One article I'm looking at is Freak Out!, so this is rather important.)
  3. When reading quotations, should I modify my tone at all? I don't want to introduce bias by attempting to emulate my conception of a speaker, but I also know that "These Mothers is crazy. You can tell by their clothes" is going to sound strange when read levelly.
  4. For embedded quotations (those not set off from the text), should I say "quote" and "unquote" before and after reading? If I don't, it might not be clear that the text was quoted.
  5. Should I include track listings, credits, and other information that's in list form?

—Emufarmers(T/C) 02:59, 5 August 2007 (UTC)

Article One of the United States Constitution

Is up for featured article review, and since it has a spoken version, I thought I'd notify you. Feel free to comment or help improve this article to current featured article standards. Judgesurreal777 04:22, 23 August 2007 (UTC)

Wikipedia on your iPod - this makes it possible

It was great, whilst on a 270 kilometre train journey across the Romanian countryside, to be able to listen to articles about teabagging, the furry fandom, reggae, coitus interruptus, and a number of other weird and wonderful topics. Thanks people.--h i s s p a c e r e s e a r c h 10:31, 26 August 2007 (UTC)

How do you pronounce

Amanita phalloides

basidiomycete

α-amanitin

Sound files would be my friend, but phonetic spelling would be OK

Plus, does anyone know a good place to post pronunciation questions? This would be extremely useful! —Preceding unsigned comment added by SpeakThings:Mellerbeck (talk • contribs) 21:47, 12 September 2007 (UTC)

I don't know the answers, but I'd suggest asking at Wikipedia:Reference desk/Language -SCEhardT 22:06, 12 September 2007 (UTC)

Spoken files on Commons

A decision seems to have been taken by someone, somewhere, to remove the audio files uploaded by participants in this project from Wikipedia to Commons. A large number of spoken Wikipedia recording pages have been tagged in preparation for this move. The tag states the justification "Wikipedia is not a collection of photographs or media files and appropriately licensed media are more accessible to other Wikimedia projects if placed on Commons".

The use of this justification seems to imply that the spoken versions of Wikipedia articles produced by participants in this project bear no relationship to the source articles they're based on, and ignores the fact that these audio files probably aren't of much use or relevance to other Wikimedia projects. The clear implication is that, in future, we should not be uploading spoken articles here to Wikipedia, but to Commons instead.

This seems to be being done as part of a wider general clean-up of images on Wikipedia, and it seems probable that this decision was taken without an awareness of this project or its work, and the difficulty that a requirement to upload our work to Commons would create for many contributors and the project as a whole. Unless Wikimedia "unified login" has been implemented (has it?), the requirement for all Spoken project participants to upload their work to Commons would make the process of contributing a spoken article, which is already excessively complex, even more so. It takes a significant amount of time, effort and skill to create a good spoken article, and my concern is that to create a functional split whereby the project is maintained here but uploads are required to go to Commons would make contributing to this project even more difficult than it already is, and would reduce contributions to the point where the Spoken Wikipedia project would no longer be viable. -- Macropode 11:06, 14 September 2007 (UTC)

No one has proposed requiring uploads to Commons (though I doubt it would be as dire as you think). The tagging just means that these files will be moved to Commons, since they are free. Nothing more. Dmcdevit·t 14:58, 14 September 2007 (UTC)
While I would strongly oppose requiring new spoken articles to be uploaded to the commons (due to added complication as you mentioned), if someone else wants to take the time to properly move files to the commons once they are uploaded here, I don't think that will cause any problems for us. -SCEhardT 20:33, 14 September 2007 (UTC)
Okay. I'm not against the move per se, it was just the explanation on the tag (I suppose not to be taken literally) that had me wondering. Thanks for clearing that up, Dmcdevit. I'll get off my soap box now. -- Macropode 03:59, 15 September 2007 (UTC)
A bot is taking care of the transwiki, by the way (e.g. [1]). It's a relatively painless procedure. Dmcdevit·t 04:13, 15 September 2007 (UTC)
Shouldn't the files have "en-" prepended to their names, per the standard? tgies 23:26, 15 September 2007 (UTC)

Opinion, full recording vs snippet. Breadth vs Depth

So, I know that full recordings are requested. But is this the best way to approach this project? For this project to really take off I think it needs more awareness.

It feels to me like the spoken project is Languishing a bit. There are only a few hundred recordings or so.

I think that to increase awareness we should go for more of a breadth approach.

This would make that little speaker icon more ubiquitous.

On a side note it would be nice to increase the visibility of that speaker somehow, its too dang small. In addition, if someone clicks on it they are presented with an .ogg which I think confuses a lot of possible listeners. If they scroll down they can click on the handy, dandy java player. But I don’t think many people know to scroll down. So getting the java player to the top and a little larger would sure be nice!

So what do I mean by a breadth approach? I would encourage more readings of only the introduction, by more people. I would consider these stub recordings and maybe we need a designation for them.

I guess my main points are

1. Most people do not have the time to record a full article and will never record a full article. 2. Most people do not know that spoken articles exist 3. If more people knew about them, more people might be willing to record them (if it was easy!) 4. Eventually people would record full articles, or maybe combine forces to record the full article. I wouldn’t care if different sections were read by different people.

What are your thoughts?

SpeakThings:Mellerbeck 17:51, 19 September 2007 (UTC)

A few thoughts:
  • There has been resistance in the past to even having an icon at the top of the article. I don't think expanding it would go over well, and it probably makes sense to keep it consistent with the featured article icon.
  • Now that we have the browser OGG player, and recognizing that most users don't have OGG codec, I think it would be reasonable to change the function of clicking on the top icon: Instead of linking to the OGG file, it could either jump down to the main spoken article box or take the user to the image page (where the audio file is). Both of these locations would give the user the option of downloading the file or using the browser player.
  • I'm not sure that having just an article introduction recorded is very useful, and may reflect poorly on the project. Also, I realize that one article may not be representative of the project in general, but the bicycle article has been partially recorded since Jan 2006 and nobody has stepped up to record the rest.
-SCEhardT 18:41, 19 September 2007 (UTC)
  • I can agree with the resistance.
  • I think changing the function would be nice
  • I wonder how often someone listens to an entire article, sometimes just the intro is just the right amount :-) In the future being able to download a zillion audio snippets would be an interesting way to learn about things. If they were identified as snippets it would reflect less poorly. Also at the moment there aren't enough spoken articles to reflect poorly on the project, most people have no idea it exists! Getting more visibility should be better, at least in my mind.
  • I concur that adding on to audio has not really happened. Then again it's also not mentioned anywhere as an option.

SpeakThings:Mellerbeck 20:47, 19 September 2007 (UTC)

Recording "stub" spoken versions of full articles would get the project noticed more, but, per SCEhardt's thinking, probably for the wrong reasons, whether they're flagged as stubs or not. I'll use the case of Featured articles to illustrate my point, since many recordings are made of these. When Wikipedia users read a featured article, they are justified in having an expectation that the article meets a certain standard. The editors working on the article to get it up to featured standard put a lot of time and effort into trying to make this happen. Consider what happens when we come along, and attach an incomplete (stub) spoken version to it. The spoken stub, which, because of its incompleteness, is by definition not a high standard spoken article, gets a "free ride". It accrues the kudos due to a featured article, and often gets to appear along with it on the main page, which is supposed to be a showcase for "the best that Wikipedia has to offer". The fact that we get to put an icon at the top, and a link to our spoken version at the bottom of the source text article means that we have an obligation to do all we can to ensure that the quality of the spoken version does justice to the featured article it's attached to. In fact, if I were an editor involved in getting an article up to featured standard, and somebody attached a less-than-featured-standard spoken version to it, I might even be a bit annoyed about it! (People often take pride in their work, and rightly so).

Having complete spoken articles gives the listener the choice to listen to as much or as little as they want (or need) to. A partially complete spoken article might be acceptable as an intermediate stage to a complete one, but, again as SCEhardt has pointed out, partially completed spoken articles usually stay that way. There's nothing currently in the guidelines that says you can't add to a recording that someone else has started, I just don't think the motivation is there for anybody to do it.

In summary, I don't think this project will ever have a large numbers of contributors, increased visibility or not. Making spoken recordings takes a lot more time and patience than I think many people realise until they try it (observe how the "in progress" list fills up with old entries when Panser Born isn't around to clean it up). You have to be both voice actor and recording engineer in one, and for the people who don't have an active interest in the technical side of recording it can be particularly challenging. (I have a good deal of respect for those who have technical difficulties but persist to produce completed recordings anyway). We don't produce a lot of work here, and that's fine, we're building this thing brick-by-brick. But let's earn our place in Wikipedia by making the recordings we do produce worth listening to. If you want to make many short recordings to increase project visibility, find some good short articles to record! Let's try to avoid the tactic of just hitching a ride on the hard work of others. -- Macropode 01:57, 22 September 2007 (UTC)

You make many good and well thought out arguments. I guess after some introspection, I think it comes down to a view of how someone would react to an incomplete recording of an article. This is probably where my view differs. I suppose there are two main reactions, first, wow someone took the time to record some of this. Even though it's not complete it does add to the general worth of the article, seeing how its pretty rare to have anything at all recorded. Or on the other hand, hmmm only a small bit was recorded that wasn't worth listening to it. It would be interesting to get a larger survey of what the answer to that question is. On a side if there are people out there who want to collaborate on sections of articles please let me know! SpeakThings:Mellerbeck 02:47, 23 September 2007 (UTC)
My "making the recordings we do produce worth listening to" comment was rather clumsy, and I hope I didn't offend anyone by implying that standards should be set according to subjective judgments like that. I think the fundamental question here is what should be the role of the Spoken project in Wikipedia? The obvious answer to that is "to make Wikipedia articles accessible in audio form". It follows, then, that the next question to ask is what standards should be set for these spoken versions? It seems appropriate that we begin by sticking as closely as possible to the standards set for the Wikipedia articles that are the source for our recordings. As an example, if an editor removed a large section of text from an existing article without adequate justification, her/his edit would probably be considered unwelcome and reverted. By producing partial spoken versions, we're effectively cutting out information from that article in the same way for listeners. I'd suggest we should be trying to stay as true to the source as possible, rather than making up our own rules regarding what should and shouldn't be included in a spoken article (with the minor exception of things that either don't translate well into spoken form or are inappropriate in a spoken version).
I'd love to make the little speaker icons in articles ubiquitous too, but they have to be backed up with some substance, otherwise they'll be seen as just advertising for this project. It's probably safe to say that the prevailing attitude within the Wikipedia community is against advertising of any description, and internal advertising by projects such as ours would not be seen in a good light by many. -- Macropode 11:42, 24 September 2007 (UTC)
Well said, well said. I just wish that a way could be found to lower the barrier to entry. Maybe I will try to recruit some people to combine sections, to spread the load. Thanks for helping me understand. SpeakThings:Mellerbeck 15:32, 24 September 2007 (UTC)
I think Mellerbeck's idea has certain merits, though yes I agree it might not be appropriate to post these on the front side of articles as if they were full recordings. I could imagine something that is not Wikipedia, but is a sort of Wikipedia application, of audio mini-articles running on an iPod, with links being expressed as multiple-choice see-alsos. That would certainly be an interesting application (of course, I would have no idea how to implement it technically), and under the GFDL rules one could develop such a system without any central authorization at all from Wikipedia. And if you want to post a link to a recording of one section of an article on its Wikipedia talk page there wouldn't be opposition to that, I think. Also, if you want to explore the possibility of collaborative recording, you should poke around the LibriVox site and see how they coordinate it (though actually, their individual recordings of book chapters are comparable to our recordings for full-length articles).--Pharos 19:35, 24 September 2007 (UTC)
I was actually working on such a project, Audio Hyperlinks[2] which probably also explains my fascination with the topic :-) SpeakThings:Mellerbeck 20:36, 24 September 2007 (UTC)

I am still a bit in dismay with the whole project indeed. I have recently moved over to Wikinews to do their regular briefs and interesting article collections but some things really bug me. One thing is I think we should remove all instances of ANY link that says "download this sound file" because you have to take several steps after that, find the file wherever your computer dropped it in your HD, open it and most likely no one has an OGG compatible player and then you've lost all interested in hearing the article in the end. Of course this has been solved recently with the in-browser player BUT, if you click on the top it gives you a download link, what gives? The recording starts at the beginning and so the little dingy button should start the player. Another issue is of course fellow recorders. I am not great nor perfect, though I am a trained voice actor and have done it professionally, but the standards of a low-quality MONO ogg file is just not doing it. Even if I have a flawless recording in stereo with my mic, the moment it goes to Mono, it dies, the spirit dies, the voice dies, etc. But I know that a 50+ MB file in radio-quality stereo is just not realistic for someone to download or stream. Perhaps here technology hasn't caught up with us to offer this service at the quality we truly want. And especially with mono files, you can't really go back and help people clean them up because there isn't enough information in the file to help your filter work. Blah, anyway, a lot of this has already been discussed but I wanted to point out things that have bothered me lately as I return to do more recordings. (and our standards for recordings, for example, to ask people to slow down is unrealistic for the mainstream audience YET as a voice actor and hearing other professionals perform more radio-ad type speech, is really not helpful in understanding the article content) .:DavuMaya:. 07:22, 21 October 2007 (UTC)

End to the slow progress for the Texas article

Hello everyone, I've been working on the voice version of the Texas article. First of all, I want to apologize for the slow progress. Since it's been going so slow, I'm starting over again from the latest version of the article. I'm kicking it into high-gear now after finding a little more time. I will update my status here periodically; I'm going to make a point to give an update every couple of weeks.

As of 10/1/2007

  • Recording: Paragraph 1 of 94
  • Editing: not done yet
  • ETA: 40 days

--Follow Christ 00:53, 2 October 2007 (UTC)

Wikipedia:No original research

WP:NOR is the subject of some proposed changes to help resolve some long-standing disputes over language in the policy. Discussion is present on WT:NOR. Cheers! Vassyana 00:38, 27 October 2007 (UTC)

Clicky player thing

When you have an audio sample, sometimes it has a little player button (as for example on Johnny B. Goode). Is there a way of making it so spoken articles have a button you can just click? As it is at the moment for me, when I click the "this has a spoken version" icon I get prompted to download an ogg. Marnanel 14:02, 4 November 2007 (UTC)

The Spoken Article box (usually down in the article's External Links section) should have the play button. -SCEhardT 14:33, 4 November 2007 (UTC)
Oh, thanks. I saw the icon in the header first, so I tried clicking on that. I don't know whether this confuses anyone else. Marnanel 18:21, 4 November 2007 (UTC)
I agree; it is confusing. Maybe a better solution would be a link that sends the user to the box at the bottom of the article (rather than a direct link to the OGG)? -SCEhardT 19:23, 4 November 2007 (UTC)

Single-word pronunciations

This is a bit offtopic, but is there anywhere I can request a word be pronounced (e.g. for Template:Audio-IPA). There was an offsite pronunciation link at Grapheme, which I removed, and ideally it would be replaced with a free pronunciation hosted here. Thanks. Superm401 - Talk 09:58, 8 November 2007 (UTC)

There is no specific area set up for this sort of request (yet), but it would be good to have one — I am quite happy to help with the setup and administration of such a request facility, particularly in terms of actually providing pronunciation recordings. In particular, it would be very desirable to have a coordinated, standardised set of pronunciations on groups of things such as place names, chemical names and so on. Hassocks5489 12:36, 8 November 2007 (UTC) (talk)

Lisp?

Would trying to record an article be a problem if I have a lisp? Purplewowies (talk) 21:57, 20 November 2007 (UTC)

I think so long as people can understand what you are saying it would be worthwhile even if you have a lisp.

You could always record a test article to see what people think of it. Thecyberwasp (talk) 20:57, 7 December 2007 (UTC)

Purge of 'in progress' articles

Hi, Would it be possible to have a purge of 'in progress' articles as some of them date back almost a year. It would also tidy the page up a bit.

just an idea Thecyberwasp (talk) 20:51, 7 December 2007 (UTC)

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