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

[Neil Harris]

Paweł Dembowski wrote:

>> Regardless of the technical means and organization of a signed Wikipedia, I
>>would encourage people discussing the matter not to use wordings that may
>>suggest that ASL is not a language in its own right, or that deaf people
>>have a less fundamental right to acquire knowledge through their own
>>languages than have hearing people.
>> Haruo
>>    
>>
>
>Well, the comments are mostly because the person who proposed the new
>project wanted to include also English language text of the articles,
>which would basically mean forking. And ASL might be a language, but
>unless it has also a special writing system, I don't know if it can be
>created - after all, we do not create Wikipedias for other languages
>that are only spoken and not written.
>
>  
>
ASL is most certainly a first-class language, but it _must be written_ 
to be usable in a text-based system like Wikipedia.

There are two main ASL writing systems: Stokoe, and SignWriting. If you 
can work out how to make either of these (or any other system I don't 
know about, but is common amongst deaf users of ASL) work with 
Wikipedia, you've got a good chance of getting a consensus to start a 
new Wikipedia for ASL as a first-class written language. Otherwise, all 
you have is the visual equivalent of spoken-word readings of articles in 
other languages: they may be interesting and even useful, but since 
they're not interactive and Wiki-linked, they're not a Wikipedia.

Your best bet is probably Stokoe, because it's less dependent on graphic 
layout. You could _possibly_ represent Stokoe using Unicode symbols and 
combining character representations, or use the in-built TeX support, or 
you could try ASCII-Stokoe, or writing a custom plugin for a Stokoe-like 
Wikitext.

SignWriting is altogether a more difficult problem, as the symbols are 
not in most fonts. Something could probably be done with a Wikipedia 
extension that converts some form of TeX-like Wikitext format to 
SignWriting glyphs, either as rendered .png files, or as SVG.

For an advanced project, you could even consider a SignSynth-like system 
that would automatically sign written Wiki-ASL.

Are there any written-sign-language experts here?

-- Neil