Wikipedia Now Lets You Hear Voices of the Subject You are Reading About

Wikipedia has started a new program which allows you to listen to different celebrities’ voices on their page. The project, which was originally started in 2012 by contributor Andy Mabbett, aims to bring even more life to the online encyclopaedia’s articles. And it’s not limited to people either. The project is also planning to expand to some of the more common voices that you hear in your daily life, which means you can help too. Recordings should be less than ten seconds long and should be in Ogg Vorbis, which is an open format. Different celebrities have been invited and several have stepped forward too. For instance, a visit to Stephen Fry‘s page will let you hear his voice, saying: Hello, my name is Stephen Fry. I was born in London and I’ve been in the entertainment business since, um, well I suppose about 1981. Fry was personally requested by Mabbett to kick off the venture. Other celebrities who have got their own voices include the astronaut Charles Duke, the inventor of the internet Sir Tim Berners-Lee and Nobel Peace Prize winner Aung San Suu Kyi. It can also be found on some other pages, however, not all of these recordings are done by people themselves, with a lot of them being taken from BBC’s interviews. All of these files are public, which means you’re free to copy and use them. The plan is to do multiple recordings for pages on non-English Wikipedia. The reason why this enormous incentive was started was to inform the future generations of the people who are popular worldwide in the current generation. It remains to be seen whether it will catch fire or not.