This certainly isn't a gimmick. It's about the status/role of sign language within deaf culture.
From our article on deaf culture:
"Culturally deaf people do not look on deafness as a disability. There is a simple explanation for this: within the community of deaf people, deafness is not a disability but an asset in much the same way it is an asset to be a Navajo within the Navajo tribe or Korean within the community of Koreans of Los Angeles. In short, it is a distinction about language. Since the Navajo or Korean view their language as no more than a social disability within the larger majority culture, so do members of the signing deaf community. They consider deafness a positive trait, because it is tightly connected to other aspects of Deaf culture which they experience as positive. Deaf unity and community is strong. The fact that deafness excludes deaf people from some aspects of the hearing culture further reinforces cohesion within the community."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deaf_culture
A person with ASL as a native language may consider the addition of ASL to English language Wikipedia to be a breach of NPOV (as well as a ignorance of the fact that these are separate languages with their own grammars). Also note that American sign language and British sign language are not mutually comprehensible.
Caroline/Secretlondon
-----Original Message----- From: wikipedia-l-bounces@Wikimedia.org [mailto:wikipedia-l-bounces@Wikimedia.org] On Behalf Of Daniel Mayer Sent: 08 September 2005 23:20 To: wikipedia-l@Wikimedia.org Subject: Re: [Wikipedia-l] new request for ASL/English wikipedia
--- Brion Vibber brion@pobox.com wrote:
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.
I'm a bit confused. What real benefit would there be for a hearing-impaired person watching a video of an article being signed instead of them reading it? I'm not being sarcastic - I'm genuinely ignorant on how sign language is processed in the brain. Is the difference similar to watching TV vs reading a book? One act is mostly passive (watching) and one is mostly active (reading). If that is the case, then this idea makes sense. But if there really is not much benefit between watching an article get signed vs reading the article, then this is just a needless gimmick.
There is no software to support such a thing at present.
Does anybody know if there is current software that can do this automatically?
-- mav
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