Future Generations Get To Know How Important People Sounded Like Through Wikipedia

Wikipedia is starting to add celebrity and other public figure voices to one of its projects, called WikiVIP, which stands for “Wikipedia Voice Intro Project”. What is it you ask? Well, Wikipedia thought it could do with some voices through all its article lines, namely important and known people will be voice sampled and the recordings saved on the Wikipedia database for preservation purposes.

The project was started by Wikipedia editors Andy Mabbett and Andrew Gray, who approach celebrities and explained this idea. The first celebrity to join the project was Stephen Fry, who now has a sample of his speaking voice on Wikipedia. The aim is to attract and spread the word so as other public figures, scientists, artists, etc. hear about the project and get their voice sample taken by the Wikipedia team.

Even BBC has reportedly started supporting Wikipedia, having short clips from some of its programming sent for preservation as well. The voices range from Sir Tim Berners-Lee to Augn San Suu Kyi. All recordings have been announced to have an open-license in order to allow others to use them freely. They can be uploaded to Wikipedia Commons in an open format, such as Ogg Vobis, sort of like mp3 but without patents restricting them.

The aim of the project and the preservation of voices is to help “current and future generations” to hear how celebrities and public figures sounded like, basically adding a voice to a face. Those who have Wikipedia pages about them are apparently encouraged to contact the WikiVIP team with a voice recording sample to help contribute to the growing database.

Thank you TheNextWeb for providing us with this information