[Wikipedia-l] Re: Conference report from South Africa

[Timwi]

Andy Rabagliati wrote:
> On Sun, 24 Apr 2005, Timwi wrote:
>
>>Heh! All the more incentive to get more people to participate in
>>[[Wikipedia:WikiProject Spoken Wikipedia]] (shameless plug)! Nobody
>>really wants machine-generated spoken versions when a real human-spoken
>>version is available. :)
> 
> There was some discussion of that. Two (very real) problems :-
> 
> * Editing. Voice editing sounds clumsy, and would sound like CamelCase :-)

Of course, you cannot edit a sound file in the same way that you can
edit text. But you're not supposed to, anyway; the sound file is not an
original article, but a reading of an existing textual version. My hope
is that once most featured articles have a recording, the regular
participants in the Spoken Wikipedia project will be happy to update
their own sound files as the article changes significantly. If someone
doesn't, well, then I guess someone else will have to re-read the entire
article, but if someone's happy to do that (which isn't unlikely if the
recording is significantly out of date) then there's no problem with that.

> * Accents. If an Indian is trying to understand what a Geordie or
>   someone from Barbados is saying, it might as well be in Afrikaans :-)

I'm not sure how large and how representative a sample of listeners you
have already surveyed, but I highly doubt this is a real problem. The
recordings are obviously supposed to be spoken slowly and clearly.

Are you a native speaker of English? Where are you from? What accents do
you tend to have trouble understanding?

Timwi