Kaixo!
On Fri, Jan 28, 2005 at 01:59:17AM +1100, David Gerard wrote:
A lot of small dialects don't have teribly standardised orthography and their Wikipedia choosing one is already likely to have a fair bit of [[observer effect]].
On the other hand, the very nature of collaborative work of wikipedia drives toward writting standardization. While the writting production of a language is limited to authors works like poetry, novels, etc; it can remain unstandardized, each author using his own spelling, and all is right; but when several people can work on a same article, with a signle phrase being potentially written by several different people, then common spelling conventions are a necessity. And it is quite interesting for me to see how the wikipedia work has given increased focus on the standardization problem for languages that until then didn't thought much about it.
Think simply about articles titles and linking; how would you be able to correctly link articles if you can't guess what the article title may be because of lack of standardization?
Is there a sign language with an accepted standardised notation already, or are we talking about inventing one?
There is a writting system yes (actually several, it seems), it is standardized in its principles; now, it seems sign languages have quite a large dialectal variation (maybe the almost inexistant writting in sign language is an explanation of that); but that problem is no bigger than for any spoken language in a similar situation (that is, with a weak written tradition).
That being said, I'm not sure that the initial question was about a wikipedia written *in* sign language; maybe it was just about providing information in other languages (like English) about sign language, in such case of course a different wikipedia is not needed, and specialized articles could perfectly fit the existing wikipedias. Until a reply about that question isn't done, we can't know what the initial intent was.
If it is about writting in sign language, a difficulty is that what seems the most widespread writting system is not encoded in unicode, so it needs extra work; but as hyerogliphs are supported in wikipedia (the only site I know that allows to type and read hyeroglyphs, btw), and as the writting system for sign language I saw has some similarity to egyptian hyeroglyphs (not in shape, in logic) a similar solution could be done if that is actually needed.
Now, as said previously, I don't know if that is what was asked for; but even if it isn't, it won't surprize me if some day there would be sign languages wikipedias; Wikipedia has made so many inroads and pioneering in languages support it is likely that the first wiki site for a written sign language would be in wikipedia; and it is definitively in the scope of the project.