[Wikipedia-l] new request for ASL/English wikipedia

[Andrew Gray]

On 08/09/05, HHamilto at doe.k12.ga.us <HHamilto at 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.

-- 
- Andrew Gray
  andrew.gray at dunelm.org.uk