[HN Gopher] Listen to Wikipedia
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Listen to Wikipedia
Author : keskadale
Score : 93 points
Date : 2020-12-28 17:17 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (listen.hatnote.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (listen.hatnote.com)
| beervirus wrote:
| Nothing better than a website that starts playing sound as soon
| as you open it!
| boogies wrote:
| 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/).
| gregsadetsky wrote:
| 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/autopla
| y-p...
|
| [1] http://listen.hatnote.com/
|
| [2] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-
| US/docs/Web/Media/Autoplay_...
| maxlaumeister wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| On Firefox, it just starts playing as soon as the tab
| opens. That's what I was complaining about.
| waiseristy wrote:
| Great way to moderate vandalism. Half of the edits I clicked were
| defacement of articles
| hndude wrote:
| discussion from 2015:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9972781
| skhg wrote:
| 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
| tonetheman wrote:
| Oh this is amazing. Very cool.
| ffreire wrote:
| Agreed, this made my day! Such a fun idea and well executed.
| Reason077 wrote:
| 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).
| redsummer wrote:
| 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?
| kzrdude wrote:
| What scale is it using? It sounds very harmonious
| Timpy wrote:
| Pentatonic, which has no half steps in it. The half steps are
| where much of dissonance is found.
| [deleted]
| Moodles wrote:
| Definitely has a Crouching Tiger, Hidden Wiki vibe to it, thanks
| :-)
| dpedu wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| That would quickly descend into a cacophony.
| joshspankit wrote:
| I feel like many of us (myself included) drastically
| underestimate the amount of changes that are done on a per-
| minute basis
| ifvictr wrote:
| 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)
| city41 wrote:
| 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?
| 29athrowaway wrote:
| In Wikipedia, most large deletions are due to vandalism.
|
| Fortunately there are bots that detect and revert those.
| dmitryminkovsky wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| > _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_sof...
| cco wrote:
| Google Assistant does a really good job if you can install it
| on your iPhone.
| linksbro wrote:
| There are hundreds of high-quality, spoken articles found here:
| 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_W...
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(page generated 2020-12-28 23:00 UTC)