Andre Engels wrote:
On 9/10/05, Gerard Meijssen
<gerard.meijssen(a)gmail.com> wrote:
Where does it say in the goals of the WMF that
everything is to be text
based? It says that we are "dedicated to encouraging the growth,
development and distribution of free, multilingual content, and to
providing the full content of these wiki-based projects to the public
free of charge." Not even the Wiki principles make it compulsary to be
text based.
No, but the Wiki principles do make it compulsory to be easily edited.
The only alternative for text-based that anyone has brought forward is
to use videos of people signing. Using that method would mean that one
would have to re-sign the whole article each time one would want to
correct a small error. Not to mention that it is a highly
non-standardized system. It would be comparable to a system of having
a Wikipedia consisting completely of scans of hand-written articles,
or of sound files.
Andre's analogy with scans of hand-written documents or sound files of
articles being read out is a very good one.
Just for the record, I am _in favour_ of starting Wikis for _all_ sign
languages, subject only to the normal rules for creating Wikipedias in
any new language, _if_ the technical problem of representing and editing
them in a Wiki can be solved.
I'm also not against someone making video files of signed Wikipedia
articles: but this would not be a Wikipedia, or even something closely
resembling one. It might, however, be a valid way of publishing
Wikipedia content, in the same way as publishing a printed or audiobook
version of Wikipedia content.
I've sent a message to the Unicode mailing list asking if there are
plans to encode the written forms of signed languages in Unicode. So
far, the answer has been a terse "Yes, there are plans."
We should also look at any possible trademark or other IP restrictions
on the writing systems: the term "SignWriting", for example, is
trademarked. See, for example,
http://signwriting.org/about/questions/quest0004.html, which still seems
slightly ambiguous to me. If we were to use it, we would probably want
either a more formal grant of GFDL-compatible rights to use the system
fromValerie Sutton and the Deaf Action Committee for SignWriting, or a
legal opinion that writing systems are not encumbered by
GFDL-incompatible restrictions.
We should also take the same considerations into account for Stokoe, or
any other writing system we might want to consider.
-- Neil