from Hacker News

Listen to Wikipedia

by keskadale on 12/28/20, 5:17 PM with 34 comments

  • by dmitryminkovsky on 12/28/20, 7:56 PM

    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.

  • by waiseristy on 12/28/20, 8:06 PM

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

  • by dpedu on 12/28/20, 6:12 PM

    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).

  • by ifvictr on 12/28/20, 9:13 PM

    Similar projects have been inspired by this. Someone made a version of this, but for GitHub: https://github.audio

    And another, but for Twitter: https://iora.live (disclaimer: I'm the author)

  • by anonytrary on 12/29/20, 8:15 AM

    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,...

    You would have to click all 40 checkboxes manually otherwise...

  • by skhg on 12/28/20, 6:49 PM

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

    Repo at https://github.com/skhg/listen-to-wikipedia

  • by kzrdude on 12/28/20, 6:50 PM

    What scale is it using? It sounds very harmonious

  • by 29athrowaway on 12/28/20, 9:18 PM

    In Wikipedia, most large deletions are due to vandalism.

    Fortunately there are bots that detect and revert those.

  • by city41 on 12/28/20, 7:50 PM

    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?

  • by Reason077 on 12/28/20, 10:25 PM

    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).

  • by hndude on 12/28/20, 9:04 PM

  • by beervirus on 12/28/20, 5:56 PM

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

  • by robric on 12/29/20, 5:42 AM

    This is beautiful.

  • by tonetheman on 12/28/20, 7:13 PM

    Oh this is amazing. Very cool.

  • by redsummer on 12/28/20, 6:29 PM

    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?

  • by Moodles on 12/28/20, 7:18 PM

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