User:James Pain/Audio Wikinews/Spoken Wikinews

 AudioWikinews SpokenWikinews

Spoken Wikinews provides verbatim audio recordings of Wikinews articles. This is to provide greater accessibility of Wikinews articles for many users as people prefer to hear lengths of text read out to them. It's also possible to download spoken articles onto a audio device for listening in various locations and on-the-move.

Spoken articles are created by any contributor that wishes to participate.

If you wish to record an article, then follow the instructions below.

If you haven't done so already, please read the Audio Wikinews Help for a guide on recording, editing and pronunciation.

Preparation
You could just jump in head first and start recording straight away but it might not get you very far and could cause many problems.

Preparation is paramount in order to create a clear and professional sounding recording.

Choose an Article
There's a few simple, and perhaps obvious, guidelines to consider before making a decision on choosing the article you're going to record. Most of these points are due to keeping the recording up-to-date with the article text for as long as possible.
 * The article should be published and public
 * Should be no older then 3 days
 * Have no issues
 * Not proposed for deletion
 * Not nominated for a rewrite
 * Not be in progress of a rewrite
 * Is not a interview article
 * Not advised to be breaking news.

If you have a choice for articles and not sure for which one to go for, here are some points to prioritize.
 * Is current news
 * In a lead spot on the front page
 * Is popular
 * Is of interest to a mass audience.
 * Could benefit using a recorded version.
 * Recently published

In Progress Template
There may be more people then yourself working on recording articles. It's not a nice feeling to have an edited and uploaded article ready to publish only to find that another one has been posted. The In Progress Template was created to avoid such conflicts. It's posted on the talk page of an article while a recording is in production. When completed and published, it is removed.

When you have chosen the article you would like to record, click onto the talk page to make sure no one else is in the progress of recording one themselves.

If all clear then add the following template yourself.

The only thing you need to change is the time and date. For example the following code...

Will produce the following.

Script
The preparation of the script is fairly simple. It's best to compile the script inside a text editor and read from it or perhaps even print it out when completed.

The start of the script or all Spoken Wikinews recordings should start with the following.
 * This is a spoken Wikinews article from wikinews dot org, the free news source. Recorded by James Pain.

Replacing James Pain with either your full real life name or your Wikinews username.

Following should be the full title of the article, for example.
 * U.S. Senate passes landmark health care reform bill

Punctuation is not vocalized when recording so U.S. would be pronounced you ess.

Following the title is the date of the publication for the article.

This is always read as Day Month the Day Number st/th/nd Year.

The day number should precede with 'the' and include the proceeding 'th', 'st' or 'nd' as appropriate. For example.
 * Thursday, December the Twenty Fourth, Two Thousand and Nine.

After the date should follow the body text of the article. This should not include; After the main text is the outro which is as follows.
 * The trailing location
 * Quote boxes
 * Image captions
 * Info boxes
 * Message templates
 * Have your say boxes
 * The sources
 * This recording was made on December the 25th, 2009 at 23:56 UTC and has been released under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.5 License.

Replacing with your own date and time at the moment of recording.

Recording
No theme tunes, stings, beds or sound effects are used in Spoken Wikinews articles, it's purely a voice compilation.

It should only be a single person heard in the recording, speaking in a clear, timely voice with mild expression.

All guidelines inside Audio Wikinews Help should be followed.

The end result should be a easily listening speech file of the article.