Listen to Wikipedia | Hacker News Reader

Listen to Wikipedia

listen.hatnote.com

134 pointskeskadale34 comments

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.

> 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...

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...

Google Assistant does a really good job if you can install it on your iPhone.

On Wikipedia specifically?

Yeah, just use Google Assistant to open a Wikipedia page, e.g. "Ok Google, look up Liberalism on Wikipedia". Then say, "Read it", and it'll read it.

Its the best artificial voice available in the wild right now I think, it is a pretty good experience.

Looks like it’s available for iOS. Downloaded and looking forward to trying. Thanks!

This also works with the Google app.

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

Really makes you appreciate how well Wikipedia works despite the constant assault on it.

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).

That would quickly descend into a cacophony.

I feel like many of us (myself included) drastically underestimate the amount of changes that are done on a per-minute basis

You can get a rough overview of the changes per minute looking at 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)

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.

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)

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...

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

What scale is it using? It sounds very harmonious

Pentatonic, which has no half steps in it. The half steps are where much of dissonance is found.

In Wikipedia, most large deletions are due to vandalism.

Fortunately there are bots that detect and revert those.

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?

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).

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

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

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/).

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-p...

[1] http://listen.hatnote.com/

[2] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/Media/Autoplay_...

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.

On Firefox, it just starts playing as soon as the tab opens. That's what I was complaining about.

This is beautiful.

Oh this is amazing. Very cool.

Agreed, this made my day! Such a fun idea and well executed.

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?

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

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