[Wikipedia-l] sign.wikepedia.org?

Thu Jan 27 14:59:17 UTC 2005

Neil Harris (usenet at tonal.clara.co.uk) [050128 01:44]:

> 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.
> Given the choice of an underlying notation, a nice general way to 
> proceed would to be able to define a vocabulary in some notation, and to 
> then reference that vocabulary using {{template}}s, thus allowing the 
> re-use of the quite complex gestural symbols units that make up sign 
> language. Multi-layered templates could allow whole phrases or sentences 
> to be built up.
> Presumably the Holy Grail of any such notation would be that it would be 
> expressive enough to allow the generation of sign-language animations at 
> some later date...

The other important question is: to what extent is this [[original
research]]?  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]]. Is there a sign language with an accepted
standardised notation already, or are we talking about inventing one?

- d.