The Wikipedia Voice
Intro Project (WikiVIP) is a novel attempt to record voices of notable
achievers in diverse fields, and make them a part of the Wikipedia entries
(e.g. biographies) in their name. Readers can reference these voice recordings
and get to know more through the voices behind the personalities. The
recordings are short – about ten seconds or so, but they could add
significantly to the multimedia bank on the online encyclopedia. Readers can
not only find out how their favorite celebrities sound, but also learn how to
pronounce their names right. The audio project should also contribute to the
digital archiving for future generations.
The project asks prominent people like famous scientists,
artists, and more, to make a short recording of their voice, lasting around ten
seconds. The recordings are then uploaded to their respective Wikipedia pages
so that readers know "what they sound like and how to correctly pronounce
their names".
While Wikimedia is off to a good start with WikiVip, it has a long way to go before the majority of biography pages include a voice recording. At this writing, there were less than 200 voice recordings available on Wikipedia via the WikiVip project— you can find all the voice recordings on Wikimedia.org
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