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