Listen to Wikipedia | Hacker News Reader

Listen to Wikipedia

listen.hatnote.com

140 pointsjmduke63 comments

Looking at the title, I assumed this was going to be about audio versions of Wikipedia articles. Obviously, this is much cooler!

I assumed it would be about the reliability of the facts in Wikipedia compared to other (online) media

Indeed, I was hoping it was going to be more stuff like this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QdDD9ViRZz4

ha, that was my initial thought.

I thought it was going to be about not ignoring messages about Wikipedia's funding drives.

At this point, I would pay $3 to never see that message again.

I didn't even know that they still did it, it's been so long since I've seen one. (Adblocker)

Since when do adblockers block those? Every holiday season, no matter what adblocker I'm using, the nagging to donate is incessant.

Ah it could be no script? I generally don't let javascript run unless I need to.

It has AUTOPLAY SOUND

(Tacking on because this is currently the highest comment.)

Very nice, I think I'll use this as my background music when programming. Reminds me of a similar (real life!) thing: The Sea Organon in Zadar, Croatia: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mtDYTeB5J-8 Skip to 5:00 to listen.

I'll admit, I scoffed at the idea. I ended up giving it a try though, and find I quite like it.

Starting to play sound without user confirmation is a default tab-close. I wont even take the time to look at it. Bonus point for not being flash that hijacks the browser shortcut.

+1.

When I come to HN, I usually read all topics on the front page, then open interesting ones in tabs. After opening 10 tabs, I hear music, then I find the culprit, close the tab, do not look back.

Never play music without user permission.

It would be good to have a "click to unmute" option as the default for how a browser handles audio. Click to play works well for Flash plugins, it might be good for audio as well.

I wish for a time disabled extension. Basically turning the browser into an html/css based image renderer. No more animated ads, autoplay audio/video. Heaven.

https://noscript.net/

Doesn't avoid animated gifs ;)

I'm sure you're joking, but here's a blast from the past (I'd forgotten about it, anyway): you can set `image.animation_mode` to `none` in Firefox for that.

I wasn't even joking, I'd really love to try purely static (beside the old guard <a> <form> elements) webpages and am delighted there's such an option, this is amazing, thanks.

I'm glad it was helpful! In case you're interested in the other hidden switches that you can toggle if you're willing to void your warranty, there's a reference at http://kb.mozillazine.org/Firefox_:_FAQs_:_About:config_Entr... . (I'm not sure how up to date it is, though.)

Never cared to search for the whole documented list of flags, usually I toy with one or two. Thanks again.

The sound is not particularly intrusive or loud, and you clicked on a link that said "Listen" in the title.

Generally I dislike websites that randomly start playing sound (and follow the same tab-close behaviour), but this was not ill-advertised or unexpected.

As others I had a totally different expectation given the title. I thought it would be a piece about how Wikipedia had some message or lesson that we should listen to. I think the author had no bad intentions and what he build is probably worth looking at. I was just pointing out how a mistake in web design made me completely ignore this website because I felt it violated my control over my computer.

In that case I wonder if we can't solve the problem in the community, e.g. by requiring a [sound] tag in the title or something. I enjoyed this link and there is a risk of people downvoting it for the sound alone that might cause interesting links like it to be removed in the future.

I'd prefer [autoplay], but I support the idea!

I sometimes post links to BBC Radio programmes. I tag those with [audio], but they are not autoplaying.

HN: should I continue to tag those?

I haven't ever submitted anything with autoplaying audio, but I imagine I'd use [autoplay] or similar.

> In that case I wonder if we can't solve the problem in the community, e.g. by requiring a [sound] tag in the title or something. I enjoyed this link and there is a risk of people downvoting it for the sound alone that might cause interesting links like it to be removed in the future.

Solving it in the community can solve the problem of people unwittingly stumbling upon it from here, but it doesn't solve the bigger problem, which is that autoplay is rude. (Surely we've all had the experience of not being able to find the tab from the huge group we just opened that's playing the sound.) It's good if sites see that they get fewer visitors with autoplay than without.

It really should be a browser level setting where you whitelist the sites that are allowed to do it. I don't mind when Youtube does it, but most sites annoy me.

You can't know how intrusive or loud sound is. It has an area effect that normal website media doesn't.

While I agree with the sentiment, in this case all I can say is: You're missing out. I enjoyed the relaxing, ambient-ish sounds combined with tempting links to Wikipedia articles.

I'm not sure there is a good solution to auto-playing. People are fine with it on well-known sites like YouTube, Vimeo, Soundcloud, etc. And most people, when they unwittingly click on a YouTube link, blame the person who made the link, not the site itself. Bizarrely, the target of ire shifts to the site if it's not popular enough.

How do you know that most people are fine with automatic playback on popular sites like YouTube, Vimeo and Soundcloud?

(Genuine question, as you stated it as a matter of fact. Not trying to be obtuse or annoying.)

I just went clicking randomly on Vimeo links and I didn't find a single auto-playing video.

You are right about YouTube and I actually think they should handle visitors that come from outside YouTube differently than visitors from inside the site. In the first case auto-play is annoying in the second it is what is wanted.

How does the 'new user announcement' chord work? And pitching in general?

The new user announcement seems to be on a 7th (always attractive for a short amount of time - mainly minor but not always - I've listened for a short amount of time). The deletes seem to be biased towards a minor chord.

I might have mixed that all up, but the chord seems to show some dependency.

Or it is just late a night.

Where is the information being scraped from?

I looked at the source but I'm hardly a JS/Web expert.

Seems to be from here:

https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Special:RecentChanges

https://wikitech.wikimedia.org/wiki/RCStream

but only found a list of weird addresses: https://github.com/hatnote/listen-to-wikipedia/search?utf8=%...

Those addresses are websocket servers that seem to publish wikipedia changes. The app is just subscribing to the changes by opening a websocket connection to the appropriate server.

Looking at their other repos and the addresses you linked to, looks like the project for publishing the changes is at https://github.com/hatnote/wikimon, which is in turn getting changes from an IRC feed at https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:Data#IRC_Feeds

Those apes sitting at the base of the Obelisk in 2001 A Spacy Odyssey may have been on the something.

Listen to the English version and then the Chinese Version - you will see the Great Firewall of China in action. :/

Seems to slow/down animation after a couple hours - very laggy. Closed the tab and audio was still playing for about 40 seconds afterwards - was thinking I'd have to reboot the machine(!)

Is there some way to be cleaning up old circles after X new ones (or X minutes?)

> Is there some way to be cleaning up old circles after X new ones (or X minutes?)

It already does this, inspect the DOM. The ones that fade away are removed as children of the <svg>.

maybe it needs to clean up more aggressively then? or have that be a configurable setting? I was seeing what looked like hundreds of previous circles on my screen.

"Bells indicate additions and string plucks indicate subtractions", This is relaxing because the of the harmony determined especially by the bells.

In addition, the WikiPedia is so powerful because the green dominates the purple..

amazing concept, and the fact that data is generating this music resulting in a mesmerizing effect gives me chills; maybe one day indeed we would listen to bots composing an entire piece on its own!

The "Listen to Bitcoin" link is broken, but this similar project is just as cool: http://www.bitlisten.com. Not sure if that's what the broken link used to point to.

This is brilliant and very soothing.

I would have imagined it to have a much faster beat... maybe this is a bad time.

Was roughly the same speed 6-7 hours ago.

Is it just me or does it not work (anymore)?

EDIT: Turns out you need to open TCP port 9000

Love it

The music sounds terrible.

WARNING: AUTOPLAY SOUND

Ok. This is cool... :)

Flagged for autoplay sound.

but that is the point of the website!

I wasn't warned beforehand.

Posted it to Product Hunt http://www.producthunt.com/upcoming hopefully it gets on the main feed!

Flagged as spam.

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