12 ms·

Listen to Wikipedia

134 points by keskadale 6y ago

beervirus 6y ago
Nothing better than a website that starts playing sound as soon as you open it!
- boogies 6y ago
  I didn’t mind — ^W is not hard to type — but it does strike me as slightly odd that this seems to have been a conscious choice: “It is based on BitListen by Maximillian Laumeister”, which requests you click anywhere to unmute (https://www.bitlisten.com/ https://www.bitlisten.com/).
  - gregsadetsky 6y ago
    Google Chrome has changed its autoplay policy in the past few years [0] -- sites now require typically user interaction before they're allowed to start the audio context. You can see this in the page's code [1] -- line 157 and further. I was surprised to hear the page start playing right away though. Maybe Chrome's "whitelisting" has become more permissive..? See this [2] as well. [0] https://developers.google.com/web/updates/2017/09/autoplay-policy-changes https://developers.google.com/web/updates/2017/09/autoplay-p... [1] http://listen.hatnote.com/ http://listen.hatnote.com/ [2] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/Media/Autoplay_guide https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/Media/Autoplay_...
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
  - maxlaumeister 6y ago
    If I remember correctly, back at the time they adapted BitListen into Listen to Wikipedia, Chrome's policy permitted autoplaying sound. The "click anywhere to unmute" notification was something I added some time later, after the new autoplay policy, so that people wouldn't think the website was soundless or that sound was broken.
    - beervirus 6y ago
      On Firefox, it just starts playing as soon as the tab opens. That's what I was complaining about.
dpedu 6y ago
Neat, although with Wikipedia dealing largely with sentence-based text, I was hoping for something that does text-to-speech. It would be cool if for each edit a voice would read the article title and the updated sentence(s).
- dj_mc_merlin 6y ago
  That would quickly descend into a cacophony.
  - joshspankit 6y ago
    I feel like many of us (myself included) drastically underestimate the amount of changes that are done on a per-minute basis
    - addshore 6y ago
      You can get a rough overview of the changes per minute looking at https://codepen.io/Krinkle/full/BwEKgW https://codepen.io/Krinkle/full/BwEKgW which listens to the event stream. (scroll to the bottom of the page, its seems slightly broken right now) This shows ~300 edits per minute on en.wikipedia (5 a second) right now. ~1500 edits per minuites on all sites (25 a second)
    - bawolff 6y ago
      There's an irc channel (#en.wikipedia on irc.wikimedia.org) that just lists edits as they happen - i always found it helped me appreciate the scale of things.
redsummer 6y ago
I remember there was a website or app which let you listen to wikipedia articles whose subject was near you, based on geolocation info. Anyone remember what it was?
skhg 6y ago
Great project. I made a fork of this recently that starts in full-screen mode: http://skhg.github.io/listen-to-wikipedia/?fullscreen http://skhg.github.io/listen-to-wikipedia/?fullscreen for ambient sound on our TV Repo at https://github.com/skhg/listen-to-wikipedia https://github.com/skhg/listen-to-wikipedia
kzrdude 6y ago
What scale is it using? It sounds very harmonious
- Timpy 6y ago
  Pentatonic, which has no half steps in it. The half steps are where much of dissonance is found.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
tonetheman 6y ago
Oh this is amazing. Very cool.
- ffreire 6y ago
  Agreed, this made my day! Such a fun idea and well executed.
Moodles 6y ago
Definitely has a Crouching Tiger, Hidden Wiki vibe to it, thanks :-)
city41 6y ago
I seem to get about 50 or so entries that play, then nothing for many minutes. If I refresh, I get another burst of entries. Possibly HN is hugging the site to death?
dmitryminkovsky 6y ago
I was hoping this would be a way to listen to Wikipedia articles like audiobooks. Unfortunately, the iPhone screen reader is not optimized for reading Wikipedia: - It reads footnote links ("one", "fourteen", etc) - It reads years like numbers ("One thousand, seven hundred and fifty six" instead of "seventeen fifty six"). - It reads introductory metadata, warnings, etc. - It reads tables. - It read image captions. Ideally it wouldn't do any of these things. Basically, it reads the screen from top to bottom, which isn't what a human would do if you asked somebody to read a Wikipedia article to you. If anyone knows a good way to synthesize Wikipedia to speech, that would be so nice! EDIT: I wonder if Apple would reject such an app from the App Store because it would compete with ebooks.
- CharlesW 6y ago
  > I wonder if Apple would reject such an app from the App Store because it would compete with ebooks. They would not, unless you went out of your way to violate App Store guidelines. There are currently hundreds of iOS "reader" apps that allow users to consume ebooks[1], graphic novels, articles from Wikipedia and similar sites (i.e. wikiHow), etc. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_iOS_e-reader_software https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_iOS_e-reader_sof...
- linksbro 6y ago
  There are hundreds of high-quality, spoken articles found here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Spoken_articles https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Spoken_articles You can find more information about the project here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject_Spoken_Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject_Spoken_W...
- cco 6y ago
  Google Assistant does a really good job if you can install it on your iPhone.
  - dmitryminkovsky 6y ago
    On Wikipedia specifically?
waiseristy 6y ago
Great way to moderate vandalism. Half of the edits I clicked were defacement of articles
- hombre_fatal 6y ago
  Really makes you appreciate how well Wikipedia works despite the constant assault on it.
hndude 6y ago
discussion from 2015: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9972781 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9972781
ifvictr 6y ago
Similar projects have been inspired by this. Someone made a version of this, but for GitHub: https://github.audio https://github.audio And another, but for Twitter: https://iora.live https://iora.live (disclaimer: I'm the author)
29athrowaway 6y ago
In Wikipedia, most large deletions are due to vandalism. Fortunately there are bots that detect and revert those.
Reason077 6y ago
Doesn't work on Safari (14.0.2). No sound. Had to fire up Firefox to hear the notes. Also, site is not secure (no https).
robric 6y ago
This is beautiful.
anonytrary 6y ago
Pro tip: You can link directly to multiple active sources. The following link marks all sources as active automatically. It is surprisingly harmonious: http://listen.hatnote.com/#uk,en,fr,sv,he,as,pa,ml,or,pl,sr,fi,eo,wikidata,pt,no,bg,de,ja,ar,nl,id,hi,te,mr,sa,mk,et,el,hu,be,gu,kn,ta,bn,zh,fa,it,es,ru http://listen.hatnote.com/#uk,en,fr,sv,he,as,pa,ml,or,pl,sr,... You would have to click all 40 checkboxes manually otherwise...

Listen to Wikipedia

134 points by keskadale 6y ago

beervirus 6y ago

Nothing better than a website that starts playing sound as soon as you open it!

boogies 6y ago
I didn’t mind — ^W is not hard to type — but it does strike me as slightly odd that this seems to have been a conscious choice: “It is based on BitListen by Maximillian Laumeister”, which requests you click anywhere to unmute (https://www.bitlisten.com/ https://www.bitlisten.com/).
- gregsadetsky 6y ago
  Google Chrome has changed its autoplay policy in the past few years [0] -- sites now require typically user interaction before they're allowed to start the audio context. You can see this in the page's code [1] -- line 157 and further. I was surprised to hear the page start playing right away though. Maybe Chrome's "whitelisting" has become more permissive..? See this [2] as well. [0] https://developers.google.com/web/updates/2017/09/autoplay-policy-changes https://developers.google.com/web/updates/2017/09/autoplay-p... [1] http://listen.hatnote.com/ http://listen.hatnote.com/ [2] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/Media/Autoplay_guide https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/Media/Autoplay_...
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
- maxlaumeister 6y ago
  If I remember correctly, back at the time they adapted BitListen into Listen to Wikipedia, Chrome's policy permitted autoplaying sound. The "click anywhere to unmute" notification was something I added some time later, after the new autoplay policy, so that people wouldn't think the website was soundless or that sound was broken.
  - beervirus 6y ago
    On Firefox, it just starts playing as soon as the tab opens. That's what I was complaining about.

dpedu 6y ago

Neat, although with Wikipedia dealing largely with sentence-based text, I was hoping for something that does text-to-speech. It would be cool if for each edit a voice would read the article title and the updated sentence(s).

dj_mc_merlin 6y ago
That would quickly descend into a cacophony.
- joshspankit 6y ago
  I feel like many of us (myself included) drastically underestimate the amount of changes that are done on a per-minute basis
  - addshore 6y ago
    You can get a rough overview of the changes per minute looking at https://codepen.io/Krinkle/full/BwEKgW https://codepen.io/Krinkle/full/BwEKgW which listens to the event stream. (scroll to the bottom of the page, its seems slightly broken right now) This shows ~300 edits per minute on en.wikipedia (5 a second) right now. ~1500 edits per minuites on all sites (25 a second)
  - bawolff 6y ago
    There's an irc channel (#en.wikipedia on irc.wikimedia.org) that just lists edits as they happen - i always found it helped me appreciate the scale of things.

redsummer 6y ago

I remember there was a website or app which let you listen to wikipedia articles whose subject was near you, based on geolocation info. Anyone remember what it was?

skhg 6y ago

Great project. I made a fork of this recently that starts in full-screen mode: http://skhg.github.io/listen-to-wikipedia/?fullscreen http://skhg.github.io/listen-to-wikipedia/?fullscreen for ambient sound on our TV Repo at https://github.com/skhg/listen-to-wikipedia https://github.com/skhg/listen-to-wikipedia

kzrdude 6y ago

What scale is it using? It sounds very harmonious

Timpy 6y ago
Pentatonic, which has no half steps in it. The half steps are where much of dissonance is found.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]

tonetheman 6y ago

Oh this is amazing. Very cool.

ffreire 6y ago
Agreed, this made my day! Such a fun idea and well executed.

Moodles 6y ago

Definitely has a Crouching Tiger, Hidden Wiki vibe to it, thanks :-)

city41 6y ago

I seem to get about 50 or so entries that play, then nothing for many minutes. If I refresh, I get another burst of entries. Possibly HN is hugging the site to death?

dmitryminkovsky 6y ago

I was hoping this would be a way to listen to Wikipedia articles like audiobooks. Unfortunately, the iPhone screen reader is not optimized for reading Wikipedia: - It reads footnote links ("one", "fourteen", etc) - It reads years like numbers ("One thousand, seven hundred and fifty six" instead of "seventeen fifty six"). - It reads introductory metadata, warnings, etc. - It reads tables. - It read image captions. Ideally it wouldn't do any of these things. Basically, it reads the screen from top to bottom, which isn't what a human would do if you asked somebody to read a Wikipedia article to you. If anyone knows a good way to synthesize Wikipedia to speech, that would be so nice! EDIT: I wonder if Apple would reject such an app from the App Store because it would compete with ebooks.

CharlesW 6y ago
> I wonder if Apple would reject such an app from the App Store because it would compete with ebooks. They would not, unless you went out of your way to violate App Store guidelines. There are currently hundreds of iOS "reader" apps that allow users to consume ebooks[1], graphic novels, articles from Wikipedia and similar sites (i.e. wikiHow), etc. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_iOS_e-reader_software https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_iOS_e-reader_sof...
linksbro 6y ago
There are hundreds of high-quality, spoken articles found here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Spoken_articles https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Spoken_articles You can find more information about the project here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject_Spoken_Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject_Spoken_W...
cco 6y ago
Google Assistant does a really good job if you can install it on your iPhone.
- dmitryminkovsky 6y ago
  On Wikipedia specifically?

waiseristy 6y ago

Great way to moderate vandalism. Half of the edits I clicked were defacement of articles

hombre_fatal 6y ago
Really makes you appreciate how well Wikipedia works despite the constant assault on it.

hndude 6y ago

discussion from 2015: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9972781 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9972781

ifvictr 6y ago

Similar projects have been inspired by this. Someone made a version of this, but for GitHub: https://github.audio https://github.audio And another, but for Twitter: https://iora.live https://iora.live (disclaimer: I'm the author)

29athrowaway 6y ago

In Wikipedia, most large deletions are due to vandalism. Fortunately there are bots that detect and revert those.

Reason077 6y ago

Doesn't work on Safari (14.0.2). No sound. Had to fire up Firefox to hear the notes. Also, site is not secure (no https).

robric 6y ago

This is beautiful.

anonytrary 6y ago

Pro tip: You can link directly to multiple active sources. The following link marks all sources as active automatically. It is surprisingly harmonious: http://listen.hatnote.com/#uk,en,fr,sv,he,as,pa,ml,or,pl,sr,fi,eo,wikidata,pt,no,bg,de,ja,ar,nl,id,hi,te,mr,sa,mk,et,el,hu,be,gu,kn,ta,bn,zh,fa,it,es,ru http://listen.hatnote.com/#uk,en,fr,sv,he,as,pa,ml,or,pl,sr,... You would have to click all 40 checkboxes manually otherwise...