On 08/09/05, 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.
It strikes me that this might be more practical if it were done in a similar way to the "Spoken Wikipedia" articles; rather than setting up a new wikipedia, build it "in-line" to the existing English wiki.
If you're not aware of the Spoken Wikipedia project, it aims to add an audio file to articles; these are linked through an information box on the page, along with a note of which version of the page they came from (so "audio file dated 15th June 2005") and can be downloaded by users.
See, for example, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Split_infinitive for a sample of what the page looks like.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject_Spoken_Wikipedia has more details; as Wikipedia handles sound and video files in much the same way, this would be the most effective way of going about it. I'm not sure if a new "bilingual Wikipedia" is really the best way to handle this; the project would likely cope much better as part of the larger en.wiki community.
Since video files are effectively impossible to edit in the same way as text, any seperate wiki would end up having to do something like this anyway; as such, you'd not really gain anything by not having the thousands of regular English Wikipedia contributors not working on the text versions of the articles.
That said, the addition of sign-language forms of articles is an interesting idea; I would be delighted to see the option taking off, though personally I'm unsure of the potential size of the audience. We shall see.