[Foundation-l] Signal languages Wikimedia projects

[Gerard Meijssen]

Hoi,
The same arguments that apply to people who speak languages like Yoruba and
Sango apply to any of the sign languages.. People who are deaf and sign are
better served when equal information is available in their sign language.

When people are motivated to work on "their" wikipedia, they do this for
their own reasons. When their motivation is that it develops and promotes
their language, it is something that is very much particular to them. When
well written articles are available for any language, it does indeed promote
and develops that language. It is the consequence of quality work. In my
opinion it is something we should seek for any language. When people argue
that great texts will develop their language, it is therefore a positive
argument not a negative one.
Thanks,
      GerardM

2008/11/27 Andre Engels <andreengels at gmail.com>

> On Mon, Nov 24, 2008 at 5:40 PM, Marcus Buck <me at marcusbuck.org> wrote:
> > Andre Engels hett schreven:
> >>> nd this configuration does make sense, in my opinion. If we
> >>> have a hypothetical language with one million oral speakers, but only a
> >>> handful of people able to write, it will still be useful to create a
> >>> written encyclopedia. Cause if you start to teach the one million
> >>> analphabets how to read, they immediately have written content
> >>> available. If there is no written content available, there is no
> >>> incentive to learn to read. It's a chicken or egg dilemma. Why are
> there
> >>> so few books in Breton? Cause there are so few people able to read
> >>> Breton. Why are there so few people able to read Breton? Cause there is
> >>> so few content available. (among other reasons) It's a self-energizing
> >>> effect. The more content there is, the more interest there will be.
> >>>
> >>
> >> That may be a laudable task, but it is not our task.
> > Are you sane? That's _exactly_ our task! Give access to information to
> > people, who nobody else cares about.
> > English Wikipedia is a great project, but almost all information in it
> > can be found elsewhere on the internet. There are other online
> > encyclopedias, databases, private and institutional websites, Google
> > Books. English Wikipedia is just a more convenient way to access the
> > information out there. It saves you time sorting out the good and bad
> > information on the world wide web. That's it, a convenience tool. But a
> > well-developed Yoruba Wikipedia or Gan Wikipedia or Sango Wikipedia or
> > [add in here one of hundreds of other languages] could be the only
> > easily accessible information resource at all. Nobody cares about giving
> > information access to the five million Sango speakers or the hundreds of
> > thousands signers. We should care! I doesn't cost us much. Well,
> > actually it doesn't cost us anything.
>
> You grossly misunderstood me. What I claimed was NOT that we should
> not be making information available in 'smaller' languages. What I
> want to claim is that we should do so to make the *information*
> available, not to help the *language* develop. Wikipedia is there to
> spread the information. We should have Wikipedia in Yoruba and Sango,
> not because that helps develop the Yoruba and Sango _languages_ to get
> more useful and have a higher status, but because it helps the Yoruba
> and Sango _speakers_ to get the information they want.
>
> And that's where I have my doubts about sign language, at least at
> this point in time - even among those who have (say) ASL as their
> first language, literacy in English or Spanish seems to be a lot
> higher than that in sign language. A Yoruba or Sango speaker may be
> able to use an English or French Wikipedia quite well to get
> information, but would be helped even better if the same information
> were available in their mother tongue. A signer on the other hand is
> likely to have less difficulties understanding written English than
> written sign language.
>
> --
> André Engels, andreengels at gmail.com
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