Hi. This is my first post to this group.
I'm wondering if anyone's had a go at converting their audio to .ogg
and putting it on a relevant Wikipedia article. There seems to be some
discussion of various audio collections at the moment, and lots of
people posting audio files. It would be more exciting if we were
contributing our audio to a collection, like that of Wikipedia, and
the related Mediawiki Commons. Personally I've contributed a heap of
photos, but now I'm looking to start with audio.
If you're interested, you can upload your sounds to Wikimedia Commons,
which is where you upload media you want to use on Wikipedia. You need
to sign up (Just choose a username + password. They don't require
anything else.)
Here's the existing Wikimedia Commons animal sounds category (not a
massive number):
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Animal_sounds
The upload form is here: (you need to log in first)
http://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=3DSpecial:Upload&uselang=3D=
ownwork
Wikipedia / Wikimedia is a non-profit org. Media you contribute has to
have a free license -- the most restrictions they'll accept are that
you require attribution, and (if you choose) that any derivatives made
by others are "share alike" (CC-BY or CC-BY-SA). This places less
restrictions on re-users of the sounds than what's allowed by the
freesound project < http://freesound.iua.upf.edu/ > or the Internet
Archive < http://www.archive.org/ >, which are also fine repositories.
Soundtransit < http://soundtransit.nl/ > doesn't seem to show what
licenses sounds are given.
The Wikimedia web sites aren't the most friendly or intuitive to use
(though they have improved), but the ease of editing means other
Wikipedians can easily tidy things up or add categories and links to
your media when they're needed.
And of course the best thing about uploading to Wikimedia Commons is
that you or other Wikipedians can easily place the sound on Wikipedia
articles (and if you've ever searched for a bird or animal species, or
a geographical place on google, you'll probably notice that the
Wikipedia article usually comes up in the first 10 results)
Some example articles that use wikimedia-commons sounds:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yellow_Warbler
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tokay_gecko
Anyway, that's enough of a spiel about how to contribute, Has anyone
had a go already?
Peter Halasz
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