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I imagine this isn't the most watched talk page in the world, but I've been thinking about recording a couple articles for some time but I'm curious if there's any data to suggest that people actually listen to them? Not that I'm that important, but if I'm going to spend that much time on something I'd like to have an idea someone is to benefit from it. Cheers, MediaKyle (talk) 12:54, 18 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Yes, there is data on usage and probably largely because 1. the audio file is buried at the bottom of the page, often beneath a large section of references, where few people scroll to and 2. because of the outdated too-small audio player (plus a lack of integration into podcast players), indeed just very few people listen to these.
The most listened-to fully-manually-created audio file currently seems to be the audio for Sex, listened to ~6000 times the past month but the average is much lower (100 maybe?) and stats can be seen here. An issue with that tool is that it's limited to 500 files while the category contains over 2,500 files (which is just a tiny percentage of the >7 M articles) and the massviews tool doesn't work at all; I don't know if there are further tools for this. Can totally understand your reasoning, it's a good question and thing to consider. Prototyperspective (talk) 13:55, 18 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Thanks a lot for your response. Those statistics made me depressed, honestly. So our top spoken articles are... "Sex", followed by "69 (sex position)", followed by the sexual act abbreviated with "CBT", followed by... Catholic Church. Then back to the sex stuff. Seems about par for the course. It's promising to see articles like Elizabeth II and Titanic on the list though. I think it would be expected that the total views would be relatively low given that the primary audience for these would be those with visual impairment... So even at ~100 views per month they're probably doing their job. I never considered how clunky the audio player is though, but maybe that matters less when you can't see very well. Something to think about in any case. Cheers, MediaKyle (talk) 14:12, 18 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Well I think audio files of articles (regardless of how they were made if quality is sufficient) would better be displayed differently such as via some clearly visible play button in the article lead. I think it would be good to have some experimentation done where this is changed for some articles and one investigates how the views change and maybe gather some feedback regarding whether people think it's useful and how the play button is displayed and whether they noticed it etc. I think articles well suited for spoken audio files are those about history for example and other things for which there are also audiobooks and podcasts like Stone Age or histories of collapsed civilizations etc. An example issue with the current audio player is that one can't skip to a specific section or skip a section which also is relevant for long articles. Millions of people listen to podcasts daily and there are a lot of interesting articles, including on those topics that videos and podcasts that people consume are about. In short, I think the listeners numbers could be much higher. Glad the links were helpful and didn't mean to make you feel depressed about this. Prototyperspective (talk) 14:33, 18 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]
That's a great point about not being able to skip sections, and I agree with you that spoken articles definitely could see a lot more use if they were more prominently displayed and a proper audio player was put in place. If you'd be able to help with implementation, I'd be interested in helping out with experimenting a bit with Spoken Wikipedia. I took a look at some of the highest viewed articles at the moment to look for one that isn't too long, and Mark Carney might be a good choice for a recording. I'm wondering if we can find some sort of workaround for the sections... My initial thought was separate audio files for each section with a hatnote or something linking to it under each header, but I think that would make it far less intuitive for the visually impaired. My line of thought here is that if we record Carney's article and get positive feedback, we could move on to an even more visible article like the Pope, and at that point it might be easier to get the ball rolling on a new audio player where the need becomes more obvious. Let me know what you think. MediaKyle (talk) 15:02, 18 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Good to see somebody thinking about this. That's actually not a bad idea but I'm not so sure whether editors would be okay with having some play button in each section because it often seems like anything technologically new or novel layout-wise has a very hard time on ENWP which I think can be quite counterproductive (when considering real-world use/impacts/needs/users/stats). Further issues are that it would only work when playing the audio file within the Wikipedia article and not e.g. from its file page or after downloading the audio (I usually download them into my podcast player) and that it's barely scalable since for every audio file one would need to manually 1. check for the audio timestamps where the sections start and 2. specify the timestamps in seconds for every section. I'm pessimistic about the viability of this because there also is a third issue on top of these: section titles and scopes can be changed and/or their order be rearranged. It could however be implemented using a button that uses this: c:Commons:Video#Temporal media fragments. An illustration is on the right which starts at section "Nature and wildlife". Note that this workaround does not work via links in the file description or caption. Prototyperspective (talk) 15:34, 18 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]
That's an interesting way to go about it. I see what you're saying how that wouldn't work in a lot of cases due to the article changing over time, however, I can see that working quite nicely on an article that's already more or less "complete", and very stable. I took a look at the FA list and a good example might be Victoria Cross - high page views, but not so high that introducing something a little different would be too controversial, and it's short enough that it wouldn't be a big production to record it. Seems to have changed very little in at least a year, so we wouldn't have to worry about the section ordering changing. I'm guessing captions can be applied to those media fragments, so we could just label each one "Listen to this section" or something to that effect, with an additional link underneath that leads you to the full recording. That would solve the issue of not being able to skip sections, as well as make the audio version a lot more visible. Maybe I'll give it a try and see if anyone removes them. MediaKyle (talk) 15:53, 18 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]
@Prototyperspective So after playing around with some different implementations in User:MediaKyle/sandbox3, I've ultimately come to the conclusion that there really is no good solution without a better audio player, as basically all of the alternative implementations are too intrusive, would conflict with images, and otherwise just not be suitable. The only thing I've come up with that we could realistically do with what we have now is to make Template:Spoken Wikipedia collapsible, so it can go directly underneath the infobox instead of/as well as all the way down at the bottom of the article. Just imagine if the one that's on my sandbox right now was collapsed to the height of "Listen to this page", and you could click "Show" to the right of that to expand it and start listening. We can try it on a few articles and check back in a couple months and see if listens increased. If we think this is a good idea I can try to figure it out and make an edit request over at the template. Cheers, MediaKyle (talk) 12:33, 19 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Thanks for working on this, experimenting and providing this heads-up. I think developing a modern proper audio player as described here with good UI and features like skip x seconds back is of high importance and could enable many millions of more Wikipedia reads (listens).
to make Template:Spoken Wikipedia collapsible, so it can go directly underneath the infobox Good idea! That is also because then the audio could have a much larger width which would make it easier to jump around or jump back which is near impossible with the very small (small width) audio player. I support such a change. However, note that not all articles have an infobox so for these it would be just somewhere near/in the lead.
For context and view-stats, see the thread above. Very few people scroll down to the external links or if they do it's when the audio file is no longer relevant. Prototyperspective (talk) 13:19, 19 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Hello everyone, some of you might be interested in WikiNarrator, a new user script to read selected passages or whole articles aloud. More information on installation and usage can be found at User:Phlsph7/WikiNarrator. Please let me know if you have new feature ideas for the script or encounter problems. Phlsph7 (talk) 10:04, 20 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]
I’m a little confused as to what namespaces should be read aloud, I mean, is it just main space, or does it apply to Talk pages, or just every single namespace, including Special, TimedText, and Mediawiki?
HouseLiving roomDIY Fixings02:16, 21 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]
