Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2009-10-12/Dispatches

Sounds on Wikipedia are somewhat neglected: while large teams of individuals scout out visual images for our articles, many of the most important public-domain musical compositions lack any sort of recording; few speeches, even if a public domain recording exist, have been uploaded; and almost no animals have recordings of their distinctive cries.

In this occasional series, we'll walk you through the use of sound files on Wikipedia, and how you can overcome any problems.

In this first article, we discuss how to put a sound in an article, suggest where to find freely licensed sounds, and introduce you to the Featured Sounds process. It presumes a basic knowledge of how things are set up in Wikipedia, such as how to include images in an article. It will be helpful if you have used at least one template before, such as an infobox or one of the citation templates.

Let's begin!

Putting sounds in articles
Most Wikipedians probably know how to insert an image into an article. Unfortunately, sounds are not quite so well-supported in Wikicode, and you'll need to use a template to set them up.

The most common templates in Wikipedia articles are Listen and multi-listen item and its helper templates. The Listen template acts much like a thumbnailed image, whereas multi-listen item puts the file in-line. Both use basically the same format. For example:



This code produces the box seen to the right. There are three basic parameters: filename, title, and description:
 * filename is the filename of the sound, without the prefix "File:". For instance, here we want to include File:Sor Op 31 No 1 Rec 2.ogg, and so have put "Sor Op 31 No 1 Rec 2.ogg" in the template after "filename=".
 * title is the name of the sound. Here, "No.1 from Fernando Sor's 24 Progressive Lessons For Beginners, Op. 31"
 * description lets you provide a bit more information. All wikilinks need to be put in here: if you try to link Fernando Sor in the title, it won't work.

multi-listen item works similarly, but was originally meant to allow long lists of files, so you need to put multi-listen start before it, and multi-listen end afterwards to get the documentation. Example:




 * gives

Any number of multi-listen items can be put between multi-listen start and multi-listen end.

For more information, see the documentation at Template:Listen and Template:multi-listen item

Finding sounds
If you can record the sound yourself, do so. You'll be helping Wikipedia's educational mission! There is some guidance on audio editors for the Ogg format on the help page for audio.

Recording music or sound yourself is not always possible. Luckily, several good sites exist for free-licensed recordings. For example:


 * http://music.ibiblio.org/pub/multimedia/pandora/ – A collection of recordings formerly sold by the Pandora Records label, which were released under the Open Audio License when the company closed at the end of the vinyl era. Most of it is already used on Wikipedia, but donations of non-Pandora Records material (released under the same license) appear fairly regularly.
 * http://www.archive.org – While care must be taken to check the copyright, and research is often necessary to figure out exactly what you've found, this is probably the largest collection of public domain and freely licensed material out there after Wikimedia Commons
 * Creations of U.S. Government employees made in the course of their duties are in public domain. This allows use of such things as http://www.fws.gov/video/sound.htm and speeches from Presidential libraries.
 * The Library of Congress

A good way to find specific recordings is to search the internet for, say, "Mamie Smith Public Domain" or "Beethoven Piano Sonata Creative Commons", or other common free licenses. For recordings you already know are out of copyright, try "'Name-Of-Recording MP3"

Wikipedia only allows you to upload Ogg files, but the free program Audacity will allow you to convert MP3, .wav, and many other common file formats into ogg.

Another possibility is old recordings. Copyright for sounds is complicated, and not generally covered under the same rules as images. For instance, in the European Union, sounds go out of copyright after 50 years from recording, though there are moves to increase this to 70. Hence, any recording of a public domain work done in the European Union before 1939 is almost certainly out of copyright and perfectly fine to upload to Commons. (Contact me at User talk:Shoemaker's Holiday for help with sound copyrights, for now; I'll try to do a report on them later.)

For songs under copyright, Wikipedia's policy for fair use allows up to 30 seconds or 10% of the song (whichever is shorter) to allow discussion of a musical style, group, or iconic piece of music. Clips of copyrighted historic speeches may also be included for discussion. In both cases, the use must be minimal, and significantly add to understanding.

Wikipedia is based on free culture, and, as such, if a free-licensed or public domain recording could, at least in theory, be acquired, we must use that. For instance, public domain songs such as a piece by Ludwig van Beethoven (who died in 1827) could have a free recording made, and we thus cannot use commercial recordings unless they are out of copyright.

Featured sounds
If you find a really good file, and it's free licensed or public domain, try nominating it at WP:Featured sound candidates. Sounds that pass the nomination process can be found at Portal:Featured sounds; there are currently 128 featured sounds.