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

[Mark Williamson]

That would be a bit silly.

English is spoken in quite a few countries: the US, Canada, the UK,
Australia, South Africa, India...

In these countries, there are several distinct signed languages used:

American Sign Language in the US and much of Canada
Maritime provinces signed language in Canada (I think??)
British Sign Language in the UK
Auslan in Australia
Indian Sign Language in India.

Now, would it be practical to include videos in every single one of
these with each article?

Also, based on responses to this thread as well as personal experience
elsewhere, it seems that the pioneering work of William Stokoe in sign
linguistics has not yet reached the general hearing public. The main
point of his research was that signed languages are fully developed
languages of their own, and are fully independent of spoken languages.

They are NOT alternative systems for representing spoken languages
(with the exception of a few signed languages constructed specifically
for that purpose, but none of which has native users)

Now, your question about most deaf people reading and writing English
is indeed a very valid one.

But then, it's also true that all Cornish speakers are bilingual in
English. So why do we have a Cornish Wikipedia? What about the Scots
Wikipedia? Why do we have a Catalan Wikipedia when nearly all Catalans
can read and write Spanish or French?

The simplest answer is that it is the native language for these
people. Reading an article in one's native language gives a deeper
level of comprehension than reading an article in a language learnt as
a foreign language.

However, in response to the main request, I'm not sure a video medium
is a good idea for a few reasons.

1) Video has high space and bandwidth requirements.
2) Interwiki links are impossible.
3) People may have a problem with the way a particular person signs.
It is impractical to upload many videos for the same article, as can
be done for the spoken Wikipedia projects.
4) Artificial generation of signed languages is easily implementable,
and requires much much much less server space and bandwidth -- the
data is stored as plain text, and the sign language is generated by a
virtual person as part of an external program (or perhaps a java
applet or something).

Bilingual medium also seems a bad idea for a few reasons.

1) Deaf people using ASL may have other languages as well. For
example, one's mother tongue may be Navajo, but for deaf Navajos, the
common sign language is ASL.
2) American Sign Language is used outside of the US, including
sometimes in countries where English is not widely spoken.

Mark

On 08/09/05, Phroziac <phroziac at gmail.com> wrote:
> Uhm, why does that need it's own wiki? Couldn't the videos just be
> added to en wiki?
> And also, can't most deaf people (in english speaking countries)
> read/write english?
> 
> On 9/8/05, HHamilto at doe.k12.ga.us <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.
> > Harley Hamilton
> >
> >
> > _______________________________________________
> > Wikipedia-l mailing list
> > Wikipedia-l at Wikimedia.org
> > http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l
> >
> 
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