[Wikipedia-l] Re: Sample ASL/English entry

[Mark Williamson]

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 at 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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