Talk:LibriVox

Jimbo on Librivox

User:Jimbo on Librivox:

"On the Librivox thing, they seem like good people, and good links, I wonder if you could give some advice on how we all (you, me, them) might all work together to have a group of disinterested Wikipedians go through as a project adding any and all relevant links?--Jimbo Wales 21:02, 12 March 2006 (UTC)" from [1]

Since the works are all public domain, it should be no problem to add links on Wikisource to the equivalent item on LibriVox. Add each of those on Wikisource to a category "Items read aloud on LibriVox" or somesuch, and link to that page from here. Subcategorize the page: alphabetically by author, and by title. Add another two category pages: nonfiction sorted by Dewey Decimal, and fiction sorted by genre. Make it a Wikisource/LibriVox portal page.

I know it's not our duty to categorize LibriVox for them, but rather to make it easier for those who prefer audio versions of Wikisource material to have it easily available. This includes the non-sighted. --68.35.127.124 (talk) 05:14, 5 March 2008 (UTC)

this would be great ... i wonder if we could do an xml catalog dump into wikisource? would anyone be interested in receiving & processing such a thing? Mackinaw (talk) 13:57, 5 March 2008 (UTC)

Baltimore Sun Quote

I am concerned about having this quote on the page, as it says that we have 15 unabridged novels. We currently have just over thirty unabridged novels, plus many poems and short stories, and the list grows weekly. That quote will lead people to believe that we only have 15 novels. Perhaps there should be some note of when that quote was written, and that we have many more than 15 books. -GreenKri 14:18, 13 March 2006 (UTC)greenKri

I agree. It would seem to make sense to add the date of the article (which is February 9, 2006). ---Gmackenzie 16:44, 13 March 2006 (UTC)gmackenzie

Review by the founder:Dostoyevsky. Notes from the Underground

(edited and copied from my user talk page)The founder read a couple of chapters in it. The variation in reading style is big. The first chapters are not "read well" by Holywood standards, but Gord, for instance is a great, trained reader. Many different Dostoyevskys speak to you in this work. All compelling for their own qualities, & their amazing, human, naked and vulnerable faults. But you can hear the love in every voice, for every word uttered, and there is something magic about that, something so outside, beyond, the standards we have been trained to accept in a "recording". WAS 4.250 04:12, 14 March 2006 (UTC)

Redhat.com Article

Redhat recently showed an article about Librivox by Rebecca Fernandez that explains the project very well. The Article. If you want a very well researched summary of Librivox, this is it.GreenKri 04:32, 17 March 2006 (UTC)

Further Reading

Although there is some relationship between the Gutenberg project and Librivox... I'm not sure why the link to "computer-generated" Audio Books on Gutenberg is present... Librivox has nothing to do with Gutenberg's computer-generated files. In fact, Librivox is philosophically opposed to "computer-generated" readings of literature. The prevailing opinion at Librivox is that literature is better presented through the human voice. While this may be a helpful link for those looking for Audio Books, it really has little to do with Librivox (the subject of the page).

---Gmackenzie 16:44, 13 March 2006 (UTC)gmackenzie

Factual info

I added some factual info to the intro, as follows: "Librivox is a digital library of free public domain audio books, read by volunteers. The project started in August 2005, and as of July 2006 has a catalog of about one hundred full length, unabridged books, and numerous shorter works. LibriVox recordings are primarily in English, however other languages are also available, including German, Spanish, Italian, Hebrew, Finnish, Latin and Old English." I am a member of LibriVox so if anyone objects to me adding that edit, well, here it is on the talk page.Mackinaw

I've updated the factual info re the LibriVox catalogue. I'm a LibriVox volunteer, too. Gesinegesine

Removed link to Agatha Christie book

Due to possible copyright conflict, the Agatha Christie books have been removed from the LibriVox catalog until this can be resolved. I have replaced the SOLO book listed in this article with another popular title from the LibriVox catalog. thistlechick 14:31, 16 October 2006 (UTC)

Spoken Article

This is my first attempt and it seemed simple enough. Enjoy.Reason turns rancid 23:12, 12 August 2007 (UTC)

Rewrite

Hi. I've changed the article quite a bit. Hopefully you will think it has been improved. I'm aware that I have not included citations, but I will try to get round to it. Thanks. --82.69.202.14 (talk) 17:31, 9 January 2009 (UTC)

Budget

Is the budget really $0.00? Is this a joke? I am positive that their hosting fees for all those audio books are off the wall, so please post FACTUAL information.68.225.166.76 (talk) 15:53, 16 February 2009 (UTC)

Obviously, there's no such thing as a free lunch, but I think the idea is that at present neither the members nor the organisers pay anything. They do live off the goodwill of the Internet Archive, who provide server space for all the audio files. --89.242.182.91 (talk) 00:36, 17 February 2009 (UTC)

There was no budget in the sense that LibriVox was not itself administering any money, and all expenses was being paid by third parties. However, this information should be changed, as it is no longer true. Hosting expenses are about $5000 a year, and LibriVox is currently having a campaign asking for donations. The goal is $20K. See post on LibriVox website: http://librivox.org/2010/02/24/librivox-needs-your-help/ —Preceding unsigned comment added by 65.92.213.241 (talk) 22:46, 2 March 2010 (UTC)

Template

I've tried to make a template for linking to LibriVox recordings: {{User:IIVeaa/sandbox|Max Havelaar}}

what do you think? I don't have a lot of experience with making templates though. I can't seem to find how to remove the lock. see User:IIVeaa/sandbox|my sandbox for more --IIVeaa (talk) 13:33, 1 August 2011 (UTC)

See also

I would like to see "See also" to similar projects. {I am looking for some audiobook and need a lot of databases to lookup } — Preceding unsigned comment added by 62.21.56.80 (talk) 16:56, 11 April 2013 (UTC)

Better sources

The references/sources in the article are terrible - almost all seem to be blogs or internal LibriVox documents, both of which fail WP:RS.

Seconded. Particularly an issue on the quality section, where imo a falsely positive impression is given of discussion around the issue of multiple readers and minimal baseline quality threshold. Most discussion I've seen of this over the years has been various shades of exasperated. LibriVox appears to be in perennial denial about this, and I suspect the tone of this article reflects that. 81.108.180.242 (talk) 14:47, 17 April 2014 (UTC)

The LibriVox website has a list of newspaper and magazine articles that would be excellent sources for inline citations, as well as expanding the Wikipedia article - see the first seven listed at http://librivox.org/pages/about-librivox/#3 are excellent. -- John Broughton (♫♫) 03:59, 28 September 2013 (UTC)

Make this page less like an Advertisement

Would this page be improved, sound less like an advertisement, if there were mention of other projects of this type? For instance, Guetnberg.org has an audio section I believe.

Are there any ideas how to improve this page to make it less like an Ad? Sorry, I do not know how to sign this.— Preceding unsigned comment added by TimoleonWash (talk • contribs) 06:47, 24 September 2014 (UTC)

I find nothing addy about this article and since the complaint above has not been elaborated for almost a year, I removed the advert-template. The reason no other similar projects are mentioned in the article is because this article is about LibriVox, not the other projects. Similar projects could be found in the categories "Audiobook companies and organizations" and "Collaborative projects". If the complaint is elaborated, we'll revisit this subject. --Bensin (talk) 19:52, 3 October 2014 (UTC)

I would like to undertake a major re-write of this page.

I would like to undertake a major re-write of this page. I have studied the page and this talk page and have many ideas to improve it greatly. I'm posting here to make sure it's OK to make these major changes, and also to see if any experienced wikipedia editor would like to be involved. Also, do folks just go ahead and make a major update, or do they put it someplace - like my sandbox - for review before publication? Thanks for your help TimoleonWash (talk) 18:53, 4 April 2015 (UTC)

I have completed my proposed modifications of this page; the results are in my sandbox and will remain their for a day or two depending on response from here. The modifications I have made are not nearly as extensive as I first had hoped, but I took out a lot of stuff that seemed like "cheer leading" and added some referenced to MSM articles. TimoleonWash (talk) 20:33, 19 April 2015 (UTC)

I have changed this page hoping to improve it's objectivity.

Consequently I have removed the prior notice about too much 1st party perspective. TimoleonWash (talk) 17:45, 20 April 2015 (UTC)

Let's link LibriVox-audiobooks to all the articles on books that have been read by the site!

There's no "WikiProject Audiobooks" or the like so I'm asking this here: could we add LibriVox-audiobooks to all articles that are featured on LibriVox?

I guess it would be a good idea to use a bot/script or something for it instead of manually going to through all LibriVox entries and checking which have their own Wiki-article.

Here's the template to use when linking them in the external links sections.

What do you think?

--Fixut͉͇̞͖͉̼̭͉͓͑̈̉́͑ȗ̹̲ͨͮ̂̂̄ṙ̫̥͚͚̜͙͍̰́̈́ė̺̩̞̗̓̉ͧͩ̿ͤ̎̆ (talk) 19:41, 7 June 2015 (UTC)

The templates are {{Librivox author}} and {{Librivox book}}. {{Librivox}} is deprecated and shouldn't be used. I'm in the final stages of adding all the authors and should be done in a few weeks. More info at Works By Project. User:TimoleonWash has been adding {{Librivox book}} to relevant articles by hand. I had no immediate plans to script that so if you want to pitch in that would be great. -- GreenC 02:15, 8 June 2015 (UTC)

Great to see someone doing it! Sorry for linking the old template - I assumed it was meant to be a "frontpage" for both the book- and author-template (maybe a redirect to the librivox-book template would be a good idea as it also includes a link to the librivox-authors-template?).

I'm wondering though why it's just author-pages that you're adding these templates too - aren't the LibriVox books also linking back to their respective Wikipedia articles? So wouldn't the only relevant differences to what you did/are doing with the authors be that there might be multiple entries for a single book on the LibriVox site and that there are multiple external links on the page (of which one has to fetch the Wikipedia one; in the case of two Wikipedia-links [2nd for the author] the one that's closest to/includes the largest part of the title; sadly it looks like the API doesn't return the Wikipedia-link)? (You already fetched them using a Lua-script right?)

I got to admit that I'm not really knowledgable concerning scripts so I basically would have to learn the language while doing it and I usually put such larger projects off. The easiest thing for me to do would be a C# program making use of some open source scraper and writer.

I just looked up AWB again and it's C# too.

How do you store the data? Maybe then I could check how AWB retrieves articles and either use that or combine it with the scraper linked above and check how some other internal workings of it to remove everything uncessary and replace it with the project's purpose's logic.

Are you referring to the this with "AutoWiki Browser script" on the project page (not sure how that works)?

I got to say that I'm not yet that skilled in programming so (for the editing-article's part; not the fetching-part) it probably depends on the AWB code, how the data is stored etc.

--Fixuture (talk) 19:59, 8 June 2015 (UTC)

why it's just author-pages that you're adding these templates too .. Go to LibriVox and look at an author page .. it has (usually) a link to the author page on Wikipedia. So the hard work has already been done to determine which Wikipedia article belongs to an author number at LibriVox. With books that's not usually the case. How do you know what Wikipedia article belongs a certain book title at LibriVox? Book titles on Wikipedia can be Title (book) or Title: Subtitle or disambig pages, redirects to a subsection of an author article etc.. and the titles at LibriVox can be in various formats as well, with different spellings or capitalizations. How is a script going to figure out the right page on Wikipedia to add the template?

Well I'll tell ya in rough outline. A script (or bot) will go through the list of authors on Wikipedia who already have a LibriVox author template. For each one it will scrape LibriVox website and generate a list of book titles available at LibriVox for that author. Then it will go back to the author's Wikipedia article and using the list from LibriVox try to establish if any book articles on Wikipedia match up, from the list. It can do this using "Special:WhatLinksHere" (backlinks) and other regex. It will have to take into account things like subtitles, disambig pages, redirects, different spellings, capitalizations, etc.. not easy. If all goes well you now have a map of Wikipedia<->LibriVox book titles. Then (second phase) you use AWB to add the templates to Wikipedia based on that map. AWB is still manual labor, so it could take a few 100 hours depending on how many articles are in the map. -- GreenC 21:55, 8 June 2015 (UTC)