[Wikipedia-l] sign.wikepedia.org?

Thu Jan 27 23:24:01 UTC 2005

Kaixo!

On Fri, Jan 28, 2005 at 01:59:17AM +1100, David Gerard wrote:

> A lot of small dialects don't have teribly standardised
> orthography and their Wikipedia choosing one is already likely to have a
> fair bit of [[observer effect]].

On the other hand, the very nature of collaborative work of wikipedia
drives toward writting standardization. While the writting production
of a language is limited to authors works like poetry, novels, etc;
it can remain unstandardized, each author using his own spelling,
and all is right; but when several people can work on a same article,
with a signle phrase being potentially written by several different
people, then common spelling conventions are a necessity.
And it is quite interesting for me to see how the wikipedia work
has given increased focus on the standardization problem for languages
that until then didn't thought much about it.

Think simply about articles titles and linking; how would you be able
to correctly link articles if you can't guess what the article title
may be because of lack of standardization?

> Is there a sign language with an accepted
> standardised notation already, or are we talking about inventing one?

There is a writting system yes (actually several, it seems),
it is standardized in its principles; now, it seems sign languages
have quite a large dialectal variation (maybe the almost inexistant
writting in sign language is an explanation of that); but that problem
is no bigger than for any spoken language in a similar situation (that
is, with a weak written tradition).

That being said, I'm not sure that the initial question was about
a wikipedia written *in* sign language; maybe it was just about
providing information in other languages (like English) about
sign language, in such case of course a different wikipedia is not
needed, and specialized articles could perfectly fit the existing
wikipedias.
Until a reply about that question isn't done, we can't know what
the initial intent was.

If it is about writting in sign language, a difficulty is that what
seems the most widespread writting system is not encoded in unicode,
so it needs extra work; but as hyerogliphs are supported in wikipedia
(the only site I know that allows to type and read hyeroglyphs, btw),
and as the writting system for sign language I saw has some similarity
to egyptian hyeroglyphs (not in shape, in logic) a similar solution
could be done if that is actually needed.

Now, as said previously, I don't know if that is what was asked for;
but even if it isn't, it won't surprize me if some day there would
be sign languages wikipedias; Wikipedia has made so many inroads
and pioneering in languages support it is likely that the first
wiki site for a written sign language would be in wikipedia;
and it is definitively in the scope of the project.

-- 
Ki ça vos våye bén,
Pablo Saratxaga

http://chanae.walon.org/pablo/		PGP Key available, key ID: 0xD9B85466
[you can write me in Walloon, Spanish, French, English, Catalan or Esperanto]
[min povas skribi en valona, esperanta, angla aux latinidaj lingvoj]
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