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@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@doe.k12.ga.us HHamilto@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
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