[Wikipedia-l] sign.wikepedia.org?

Thu Jan 27 20:38:54 UTC 2005

Yes, but does that mean we shouldn't have Wikipedias in, for example,
Frisian, Limburgish, Irish, or Basque?

While reading an encyclopedia in a secod language you use on a daily
basis is definitely doable, in many cases it would be easier and
possibly preferred for somebody to be able to read content in their
native language.

The reason we aren't flooded with thousands of requests for new
languages each day is because a relatively tiny number of people know
that they have the option to request these languages, and they are
left to believe that using the Wikipedia in the LWC (language of wider
communication) is their only option.

Wikipedia being primarily written rather than oral or gestural, it is
obviously very difficult for us to have languages that are exclusively
or almost exclusively spoken/signed. Thus, while some people may write
signed languages, at the moment the literacy rate in the first
language is SO incredibly low that an encyclopedia in one of these
languages would have next to no audience - most signed languages have
less than 1000 speakers (remember the general definition of speech
doesn't limit it to oral communication), some such as American Sign
Language have in the hundreds of thousands, and a couple (Indian Sign
Language and Chinese Sign Language) have over 1 million.

In some of these cases (almost completely limited to Indian Sign
Language and Chinese Sign Language), a great number, even the
majority, of the speakers of these languages are monolingual or have
very poor national language skills (in China, some places have
communes exclusively for deaf people so they live effectively in their
own communities; India has some similar things but not so much so),
but also perhaps .0001% of them are literate in the signed language,
and even then they may use different writing systems, so they are
unreachable with anything but a visual medium.

Since it isn't our job to campaign for literacy, I think we shouldn't
have Wikipedias for /any/ signed language until literacy reaches at
least 1%, and while this is certainly the case for some signed
languages (in Scandinavia, I believe) these are also some of the
places where the deaf population is most linguistically integrated,
and they mostly use SSW which is next to impossible to represent on a
computer without using images (which would be extremely high
bandwidth).

Mark

On Thu, 27 Jan 2005 19:16:28 +0100, Andre Engels <andreengels at gmail.com> wrote:
> Neil:
> > The important question is: what do our potential deaf users _themselves_
> > want? Then we can worry about who's going to find the motivation to
> > adapt the software appropriately to support their needs.
> 
> Not to discourage, but I can well imagine that many deaf users are
> quite happy with what is already there. Sign language is probably
> their first language, but many will have their literacy in the spoken
> language - that's the language they read and write, often on a daily
> basis.
> 
> It's the same with many other speakers of dialects and smaller
> minority languages - the 'big' language is the language of schooling
> and written communication. Smaller languages often remain just oral
> languages - or in the case of sign language, signed languages.
> 
> Of course this is all spoken by someone who does not have any direct
> experience with deaf people, so I gladly admit I'm wrong if someone
> else with more direct experience tells me differently. :-)
> 
> Andre Engels
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