Wikipedia:Featured sound candidates/Booker T. Washington, Speech, 1895

Booker T. Washington, Speech, 1895

I stumbled upon this while setting up the archive stats for September. It was nominated back in May, but failed. However, a big reason for this is that people, quite rightly, thought there was too much hiss. The nominator also didn't really handle the nomination very well, perhaps.

As people probably know by now, I'm pretty good at basic sound editing. Now, I can't remove all the hiss because removing hiss removes information, and past a point, it begins to become more difficult to understand him again. However, this was largely before commercial recording took off, so there presumably is no cleaner copy of this recording available, given the time period, so, if we think that this speech is important, then we can have this or nothing. I also don't think that phonograph cylinders could run more than four minutes at that time, so I'm presuming that the second half of his speech was not recorded. If someone knows differently, I'd be delighted to clean up a second cylinder.

It should probably be mentioned that none of the articles it's in are very well referenced. I don't think that's a problem in itself - one of the few references used is The New Georgia Encyclopedia which says that it is "Considered the definitive statement of what Washington termed the "accommodationist" strategy of black response to southern racial tensions, it is widely regarded as one of the most significant speeches in American history." Clearly, whatever the state of the articles now, they are important, and can and should be improved.

This is quite a lot more commentary than I normally give on a featured sound, but, since it's a repeat of a previous nomination, I thought I had best explain things in full. Thank you.

• Nominate and support. Shoemaker's Holiday (talk) 23:48, 1 October 2008 (UTC)
• Support-- Following a change in my interpretation of the criteria. Zginder 2008-10-02T03:08Z (UTC)
• Oppose. Despite the reduction in noise, I actually find it quite a bit harder to understand what he was saying in the edited version. Also, the levels of the edited version are much lower than the original (and lower than a typical sound file, it seems to me). I would support the original or an edited version that retained the full clarity of the original.--ragesoss (talk) 14:24, 14 October 2008 (UTC)
  • Withdraw - I'm actually becoming suspicious that this was a reconstruction a few years later. By Booker T. Washington, but not the original speech as claimed. Until it's figured out which, it's not worth featuring. Shoemaker's Holiday (talk) 01:39, 1 November 2008 (UTC)

Not promoted. --MZMcBride (talk) 22:29, 2 November 2008 (UTC)