1) Videos take up heaps more space than audio. A very short sample article (the English version was only 4 or 5 sentences long, a total of 88 words compared to the average 348.6) turned into a 1.5 minute, 16MB video. Now, imagine a much longer article -- the average article on enwiki is 348.6 words long. Now, multiply that by 100000. Then, add to that the fact that there are over 100 signed languages in widespread use in the world today, and you get a perfect nightmare. That ends up with over 600TB of video... an astronomical amount of space, not to mention the bandwidth costs. Angela said that space and bandwidth aren't a concern -- I sincerely doubt that anybody has that much space to donate to such a project. And that's just the first hundred-thousand articles, at the level plwiki is today.
2) It's my opinion that if Wikipedia were to be based more on spoken than on written materials, we should rely more on speech synthesis. Do some people have problems with speech synthesis? Yes. Is some software of better quality than other? Yes. Can some software be difficult to understand if you're not listening very carefully? Yes. But it's certainly better, I think, than having to re-record an article every time a revision is made.
3) What about unwritten spoken languages? Should they get their own Wikipedias, or should they just be uploaded as spoken translations of enwiki articles? It doesn't make sense to me to limit ASL to videos uploaded to enwiki.
Mark
On 16/09/05, Timwi timwi@gmx.net wrote:
Kelly Martin wrote:
Then it sounds to me like ASL is not yet mature enough, as a language, to merit a Wikipedia of its own. If ASL signers are not willing to accept synthetic signing, then I suggest that they need to adjust their attitudes (or else improve the quality of sign synthesis software).
Interestingly, though, English speakers are usually not willing to accept synthetic speech when they can have real speech from a real human...
It's not practical to record hundreds of thousands of videos to facilitate access for a relatively small community.
... and yet, the [[Wikipedia:WikiProject Spoken Wikipedia]] aims to record hundreds of thousands of audio files to facilitate access for a relatively small community (the blind).
Personally I think videos of ASL translations of Wikipedia articles should just be a WikiProject like Spoken Wikipedia. Just like our sound files, the video files would be a translation of a particular revision. When the file becomes out of date due to heavy editing of the article, re-recording should be considered, but since we haven't got very far yet, we are concentrating on recording new articles first.
Timwi
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