Andre Engels wrote:
On 9/10/05, Gerard Meijssen gerard.meijssen@gmail.com wrote:
Where does it say in the goals of the WMF that everything is to be text based? It says that we are "dedicated to encouraging the growth, development and distribution of free, multilingual content, and to providing the full content of these wiki-based projects to the public free of charge." Not even the Wiki principles make it compulsary to be text based.
No, but the Wiki principles do make it compulsory to be easily edited. The only alternative for text-based that anyone has brought forward is to use videos of people signing. Using that method would mean that one would have to re-sign the whole article each time one would want to correct a small error. Not to mention that it is a highly non-standardized system. It would be comparable to a system of having a Wikipedia consisting completely of scans of hand-written articles, or of sound files.
Andre's analogy with scans of hand-written documents or sound files of articles being read out is a very good one.
Just for the record, I am _in favour_ of starting Wikis for _all_ sign languages, subject only to the normal rules for creating Wikipedias in any new language, _if_ the technical problem of representing and editing them in a Wiki can be solved.
I'm also not against someone making video files of signed Wikipedia articles: but this would not be a Wikipedia, or even something closely resembling one. It might, however, be a valid way of publishing Wikipedia content, in the same way as publishing a printed or audiobook version of Wikipedia content.
I've sent a message to the Unicode mailing list asking if there are plans to encode the written forms of signed languages in Unicode. So far, the answer has been a terse "Yes, there are plans."
We should also look at any possible trademark or other IP restrictions on the writing systems: the term "SignWriting", for example, is trademarked. See, for example, http://signwriting.org/about/questions/quest0004.html, which still seems slightly ambiguous to me. If we were to use it, we would probably want either a more formal grant of GFDL-compatible rights to use the system fromValerie Sutton and the Deaf Action Committee for SignWriting, or a legal opinion that writing systems are not encumbered by GFDL-incompatible restrictions.
We should also take the same considerations into account for Stokoe, or any other writing system we might want to consider.
-- Neil