
Listen to Wikipedia - jmduke
http://listen.hatnote.com/#en
======
hndude
Looking at the title, I assumed this was going to be about audio versions of
Wikipedia articles. Obviously, this is much cooler!

~~~
andrey-p
I thought it was going to be about not ignoring messages about Wikipedia's
funding drives.

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baseballmerpeak
At this point, I would pay $3 to never see that message again.

~~~
JupiterMoon
I didn't even know that they still did it, it's been so long since I've seen
one. (Adblocker)

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yellowapple
Since when do adblockers block those? Every holiday season, no matter what
adblocker I'm using, the nagging to donate is incessant.

~~~
JupiterMoon
Ah it could be no script? I generally don't let javascript run unless I need
to.

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puzz
Very nice, I think I'll use this as my background music when programming.
Reminds me of a similar (real life!) thing: The Sea Organon in Zadar, Croatia:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mtDYTeB5J-8](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mtDYTeB5J-8)
Skip to 5:00 to listen.

~~~
49531
I'll admit, I scoffed at the idea. I ended up giving it a try though, and find
I quite like it.

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pmr_
Starting to play sound without user confirmation is a default tab-close. I
wont even take the time to look at it. Bonus point for not being flash that
hijacks the browser shortcut.

~~~
Ianvdl
The sound is not particularly intrusive or loud, and _you_ clicked on a link
that said "Listen" in the title.

Generally I dislike websites that randomly start playing sound (and follow the
same tab-close behaviour), but this was not ill-advertised or unexpected.

~~~
pmr_
As others I had a totally different expectation given the title. I thought it
would be a piece about how Wikipedia had some message or lesson that we should
listen to. I think the author had no bad intentions and what he build is
probably worth looking at. I was just pointing out how a mistake in web design
made me completely ignore this website because I felt it violated my control
over my computer.

~~~
Ianvdl
In that case I wonder if we can't solve the problem in the community, e.g. by
requiring a [sound] tag in the title or something. I enjoyed this link and
there is a risk of people downvoting it for the sound alone that might cause
interesting links like it to be removed in the future.

~~~
icebraining
I'd prefer [autoplay], but I support the idea!

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zhte415
How does the 'new user announcement' chord work? And pitching in general?

The new user announcement seems to be on a 7th (always attractive for a short
amount of time - mainly minor but not always - I've listened for a short
amount of time). The deletes seem to be biased towards a minor chord.

I might have mixed that all up, but the chord seems to show some dependency.

Or it is just late a night.

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typis7
Where is the information being scraped from?

I looked at the source but I'm hardly a JS/Web expert.

Seems to be from here:

[https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Special:RecentChanges](https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Special:RecentChanges)

[https://wikitech.wikimedia.org/wiki/RCStream](https://wikitech.wikimedia.org/wiki/RCStream)

but only found a list of weird addresses: [https://github.com/hatnote/listen-
to-wikipedia/search?utf8=%...](https://github.com/hatnote/listen-to-
wikipedia/search?utf8=%E2%9C%93&q=ws%3A%2F%2Fwikimon.hatnote.com&type=Code)

~~~
jivid
Those addresses are websocket servers that seem to publish wikipedia changes.
The app is just subscribing to the changes by opening a websocket connection
to the appropriate server.

Looking at their other repos and the addresses you linked to, looks like the
project for publishing the changes is at
[https://github.com/hatnote/wikimon](https://github.com/hatnote/wikimon),
which is in turn getting changes from an IRC feed at
[https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:Data#IRC_Feeds](https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:Data#IRC_Feeds)

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zhte415
Those apes sitting at the base of the Obelisk in 2001 A Spacy Odyssey may have
been on the something.

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kxter
Listen to the English version and then the Chinese Version - you will see the
Great Firewall of China in action. :/

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mgkimsal
Seems to slow/down animation after a couple hours - very laggy. Closed the tab
and audio was still playing for about 40 seconds afterwards - was thinking I'd
have to reboot the machine(!)

Is there some way to be cleaning up old circles after X new ones (or X
minutes?)

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TazeTSchnitzel
> Is there some way to be cleaning up old circles after X new ones (or X
> minutes?)

It already does this, inspect the DOM. The ones that fade away are removed as
children of the <svg>.

~~~
mgkimsal
maybe it needs to clean up more aggressively then? or have that be a
configurable setting? I was seeing what looked like hundreds of previous
circles on my screen.

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sheziftron
"Bells indicate additions and string plucks indicate subtractions", This is
relaxing because the of the harmony determined especially by the bells.

In addition, the WikiPedia is so powerful because the green dominates the
purple..

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gamekathu
amazing concept, and the fact that data is generating this music resulting in
a mesmerizing effect gives me chills; maybe one day indeed we would listen to
bots composing an entire piece on its own!

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artursapek
The "Listen to Bitcoin" link is broken, but this similar project is just as
cool: [http://www.bitlisten.com](http://www.bitlisten.com). Not sure if that's
what the broken link used to point to.

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rhaps0dy
This is brilliant and very soothing.

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ytdht
I would have imagined it to have a much faster beat... maybe this is a bad
time.

~~~
Nadya
Was roughly the same speed 6-7 hours ago.

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chrisper
Is it just me or does it not work (anymore)?

EDIT: Turns out you need to open TCP port 9000

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harmus
Love it

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cbd1984
The music sounds terrible.

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cbd1984
WARNING: AUTOPLAY SOUND

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kxter
Ok. This is cool... :)

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cbd1984
Flagged for autoplay sound.

~~~
coppolaemilio
but that is the point of the website!

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cbd1984
I wasn't warned beforehand.

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danlandy
Posted it to Product Hunt
[http://www.producthunt.com/upcoming](http://www.producthunt.com/upcoming)
hopefully it gets on the main feed!

~~~
cbd1984
Flagged as spam.

