Wikipedia:WikiProject Spoken Wikipedia/Article choice guidelines

Spoken Wikipedia
Recording process
Prepare → Record (Read) → Upload → Add → Notify

Step 1: Choose an article

You may read any article you like (or even just a section, although complete articles are preferred), but we'd prefer that you start with one of these:

Articles soon to be featured on the Main Page
Featured articles
Requested spoken articles
Vital articles
English versions of articles on the list of articles every Wikipedia should have

Before choosing your article, here are a couple of pointers:

Use a single version. Recordings should be of a single version of an article, which should be linked to as discussed in the uploading guidelines.
Consider stability. You should consider the stability of articles before producing a spoken version — an article involved in a dispute or undergoing major revision may be a poor candidate. For this reason, featured articles are excellent candidates, as they normally aren't being edited as much as other articles.
Avoid copyrighted text. Spoken word audio clips of Wikipedia articles that incorporate copyrighted text pose legal problems (since the resulting audio file cannot be licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License). You should avoid these articles.

Step 2: Copyedit

Before recording the selected article, carefully review and edit it for clarity and readability. Simplify complex sentences when possible. If you encounter errors or challenging passages during the recording and make subsequent edits, the final recording may become inconsistent with the text.

Step 3: Prepare your script

It helps to have a manuscript of what you will be reading. Please do not use the live Wikipedia article as your manuscript, since the page can change at any time. Since recording a long article can take a considerable amount of time, you risk recording a mish-mash of different versions of the article.

Instead please use the permanent version (WP:PERMLINK) of your chosen revision of the article. In short: visit your chosen article when you (and the article) is ready for recording. Click 'Permanent link' in the right-hand sidebar's toolbox. Use this as the basis for your manuscript.

This also means you don't have to inform editors of your chosen article. Any work they perform doesn't change your script.

Toggle_VF script

I have written a Javascript that you can enable that will generate the content into a PDF file. This voice-friendly version is produced by suppressing those parts of a Wikipedia article that cannot be correctly or meaningfully rendered by a text-to-speech application; depending on the article in question, these non-renderable items may include images, tables, in-line references, various templates and user interface elements, as well as metadata.

You aren't using a computerized text-to-speech application, you are preparing a human voice recording of the article, but you might still benefit from having prepared a version of the page with the bits you don't plan to include in your recording.

However, it is missing a couple of features which I will work on adding:

It does not include the first line of text required by this project, nor does it include the last line
It does not include image captions
It does not list if there are any tables (so you should make notes as needed)

The Javascript is located here - just click "install" if you have automatic scripts installed. If you have any questions, please let me know. - P999

Step 3a:

Optionally, let the editors of the article and the Spoken Wikipedia community know that you will be working on that particular article, by putting a note on the article talk page. You might want to do this if you suspect someone else is about to record the same article, in order to avoid duplicate or conflicting work.

Step 4: Upload your recording

See Help:Files#Uploading files and Wikipedia:File upload wizard.

Step 5: Link to your recording

First, link from the article's page. The {{Spoken Wikipedia}} template is created for this purpose. See its documentation for usage. Second, link your recording on Wikipedia:Spoken_articles in the appropriate section. Please list it only once.