[Foundation-l] Fwd: SignWriting Encyclopedia Projects...new SignWriting Wiki

[Tim Starling]

On 29/05/10 23:43, Gerard Meijssen wrote:
> What I am looking for is agreement what technical issues need to be solved
> before a sign language can become a Wikipedia. Compatible policies are not
> an issue. I am thinking of being able to include images in the text and
> having wiki links. What else is absolutely required before we can move
> forward once there are sufficient articles ?

Well, you could start a wiki right now, but obviously it wouldn't be
very functional. You only need to glance at the wiki at signbank.org
to see that. Pretty much any MediaWiki feature you can think of would
be broken.

Things like:
* In-place editing. It currently requires going to an external server,
writing what you want to write, encoding it to binary and pasting the
unreadable encoded form into the article.
* SignWriting page titles (and interlanguage links from other projects)
* SignWriting edit summaries
* Readable diffs
* Links

There is also the issue of its unauthorised use of an unallocated part
of the Unicode code space. The UTF-8 decoding feature of the MediaWiki
extension should probably be disabled to avoid conflicts with future
official Unicode allocations.

You could go ahead right now with an inherently bilingual wiki: with
things like page titles and edit summaries in some common language,
like Danish for DSL or English for ASL. But without in-place editing,
it seems unlikely that it would advance the SignWriting cause very far.

What I'd like to see in a SignWriting wiki is a feature to encode
SignWriting to video, showing a computer-generated figure acting out
the text. Then those who do not know SignWriting (which includes the
vast majority of the deaf community) would benefit from it. Just an idea.

-- Tim Starling