A project to record Wikipedia articles being read out loud was launched last week, and already has managed to create over a dozen recordings.

Timwi announced the beginning of the WikiProject Spoken Wikipedia last Tuesday with the observation that "the best way of getting it going is to start recording things." The emphasis of the project is on recording featured articles, since these are reasonably complete and considered to be of good quality.

Sound recordings of Wikipedia articles are potentially useful for people who cannot read the text due to sight impairments or literacy problems. While screen readers are available using synthetic speech to deal with these issues, their accuracy and the ability to reproduce the text comprehensibly still pales in comparison to actual human speech.

The idea for the project came from the German Wikipedia, which started the original Gesprochene Wikipedia project early in 2004. The Dutch Wikipedia has now also initiated a similar project, while an effort to add spoken pronunciations to the Dutch Wiktionary has already been underway for some time.

Several enthusiastic participants produced a number of spoken articles within a few days, including five featured articles so far. One article, the ever-popular Exploding whale, produced a bit of competition for the honor of recording it, with blankfaze staking the first claim. And in one case, a sound recording was even produced for something other than an article, as Luigi30 created a recording of the three revert rule.

As with all sound recordings on Wikipedia, Ogg Vorbis is the preferred format being used by the project. For greater comprehension, Fuzheado suggested that readers not use normal conversational speech, but speak at a slower rate of about 150 words per minute.