Hi HN,<p>this is a tool I built for fun two years ago, which I now decided to release as open source.<p>It's a Java program that takes a Wikipedia page as input creates a video narrating the content of the page using a combination of sources for images and videos, plus Amazon Polly for speech synthesis.<p>At the time, I wrote a detailed explanation[1] of how the tool works, if you're interested.<p>The project is not active or currently maintained - I'm just releasing it because a few people requested it to me, and so I thought I might as well post it here!<p>EDIT: Forgot to specify: although, in theory, this works with any Wikipedia page, it might not do so very well (or at all) in a few cases. For example if the input page is very short or it has an ambiguous word which will then not result in good matching images from Pixabay.
There was a startup in 2009 or so that did exactly this. Got millions in investment and disappeared? Can’t remember the name now.<p>As far as I can tell, this sort of use of Wikipedia content - even for a monetized YouTube video - isn’t inherently against the CC-BY-SA terms. Though, you have made one change, you created a character called the storyteller who introduces each text, and a brand for that channel. That might make it a little questionable legally, even though you credit Wikipedia in the description. Also under the terms of a ShareAlike license, it seems to me that you should also provide the raw generated video under the same terms.<p>Maybe do a little inquiry into how to do this right? It seems your project is basically abandoned now though?<p>Source: my own knowledge - I did work on media licensing CC content years ago, but am not a lawyer.
Neat. Thanks for taking the time to post and show it off.<p>Do you feel as though you're essentially done with the project or is this something you'd like to see yourself working on in the future? neilk brought up that a startup tried this concept so it would seem that there is - or, rather <i>was</i> a niche in the market for it. But very cool and well done.