[Wikipedia-l] new request for ASL/English wikipedia

[Caroline Ford]

This certainly isn't a gimmick. It's about the status/role of sign language
within deaf culture.

>From our article on deaf culture:

"Culturally deaf people do not look on deafness as a disability. There is a
simple explanation for this: within the community of deaf people, deafness
is not a disability but an asset in much the same way it is an asset to be a
Navajo within the Navajo tribe or Korean within the community of Koreans of
Los Angeles. In short, it is a distinction about language. Since the Navajo
or Korean view their language as no more than a social disability within the
larger majority culture, so do members of the signing deaf community. They
consider deafness a positive trait, because it is tightly connected to other
aspects of Deaf culture which they experience as positive. Deaf unity and
community is strong. The fact that deafness excludes deaf people from some
aspects of the hearing culture further reinforces cohesion within the
community."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deaf_culture

A person with ASL as a native language may consider the addition of ASL to
English language Wikipedia to be a breach of NPOV (as well as a ignorance of
the fact that these are separate languages with their own grammars). Also
note that American sign language and British sign language are not mutually
comprehensible. 

Caroline/Secretlondon

-----Original Message-----
From: wikipedia-l-bounces at Wikimedia.org
[mailto:wikipedia-l-bounces at Wikimedia.org] On Behalf Of Daniel Mayer
Sent: 08 September 2005 23:20
To: wikipedia-l at Wikimedia.org
Subject: Re: [Wikipedia-l] new request for ASL/English wikipedia

--- Brion Vibber <brion at pobox.com> wrote:
> HHamilto at doe.k12.ga.us wrote:
> > I am writing to request the establishment of an American Sign 
> > Language-English bilingual Wikipedia. This will contain the written 
> > word versions of articles (Englsih) and American Sign Language 
> > versions via video. We have a dozen users ready to start building 
> > this powerful resource for deaf users and will be recruiting more.

I'm a bit confused. What real benefit would there be for a hearing-impaired
person watching a video of an article being signed instead of them reading
it?
I'm not being sarcastic - I'm genuinely ignorant on how sign language is
processed in the brain. Is the difference similar to watching TV vs reading
a book? One act is mostly passive (watching) and one is mostly active
(reading).
If that is the case, then this idea makes sense. But if there really is not
much benefit between watching an article get signed vs reading the article,
then this is just a needless gimmick. 

> There is no software to support such a thing at present.

Does anybody know if there is current software that can do this
automatically? 

-- mav


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