Wikipedia’s voice intro project (WikiVIP) aims at adding the voice samples of persons who are the subject of Wikipedia articles. The project asks people who are the subject of Wikipedia articles – whether they are celebrities or artists or scientists – to make short recordings of their voice, lasting around ten seconds or so.
WikiVIP is led by Andy Mabbett and Andrew Gray. The voice recordings will help Wikipedia reader’s to know what the person sounds like and how to correctly pronounce his name. In addition to this, it will make Wikipedia articles much more interesting. Imagine you are able to hear your famous personality talking to you. Wouldn’t it be great?
Stephen Fry becomes the first contributor to the project. His voice has been uploaded on his Wikipedia page. Other contributors include lunar astronaut Charlie Duke and Baron Knight of Weymouth. Voice recordings of others are being collected and updated regularly on the respective Wikipedia pages.
BBC is helping Andy in his ambitious project. It is the first time when BBC has openly licensed content from its broadcast programmes. BBC programmes are being used to extract such voice samples for WikiVIP.
You can also contribute in WikiVIP by asking people who are the subject of Wikipedia articles to make a recording of their voice (in any language they are comfortable in) and uploading it on Wikipedia. You can also help to transcribe the existing files into timed text captions. If you happen to be the subject of Wikipedia article yourself, go ahead and upload your voice clip and let the world hear you.
Read the full article by Wikipedia here.
Listen to all the recordings made so far for the project here.
