Talk:SignWiki

Support

I strongly support the creation of a wiki for sign languages. It's actually very surprising that there is none yet. I propose - instead of native signers and animated pictures - to start with a more orthographical approach. Valery Sutton can be asked for using a wiki using the SignWriting notation (see SignWriting Homepage and SignWriting at WikiPedia). Other orhographies like Stokoe should not be disregarded. If instead of verbal phrases, these gestural symbols will be used as entries, a whole other kind of wiki arises. If done carefully it will fit other multimodal extensions. Auxiliary iconic languages like Bliss, The Elephant's Memory, Visual Inter Lingua, etcetera (see Visual Language at SeedWiki).

Natural Language

The most important reason why I would be a enthousiastic supporter is because sign languages like the American Sign Language [ASL], Australian Sign Language [Auslan], the Vlaamse Gebarentaal [VGT], etcetera are natural languages. The scientists that designed the mentioned notation systems have not as mayor task to invent new signs, but to represent natural signs that already exist. It is a an autonomic evolved language structure, a culture on its own. This does have the great advantage that many, many people would be able to understand the created encyclopedic or dictionary articles. I recommend to start with the latter, a wiktionary.

Proposal

1.) The representation at top. Depict the sign in a kind of orthography at topleft. Create tabs to provide the user with language (ASL, Auslan, VGT, BSL, DSL) and orthography choices. 2.) The explanation in centre of the page. The area beneath the representation area should be designed to explanation. No verbal phrases are allowed in this area. The explanation should exist out of (sequences of) other signs. 3.) The translation at the bottom is just like the wiktionary, it does however also provide cross-modal translations.

A.) The user should be able to add a sign representation / orthographic symbol. B.) The user should be able to relate this sign to other signs by custom semantic relationships. For example, it should be possible to have a sign for "speech" and an explanation in terms of a "relational" sign "the ability to use" and another sign "vocalizations" to get "speech" is "the ability to use" "vocalizations". Forget this verbocentric example immediately, by the way!

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Problem

I think this is a very good proposal, and it should be done. However, I can think of an immediate problem. If articles are whole video files of the information being signed, I cannot think of an easy way that it could be edited (to add new information) without disturbing the quality/coherence of the file. You need to think of this before you go any further. That said, I wish you the best of luck in your endevours! Dbmag9 17:11, 4 June 2006 (UTC)

Possible solution to the above, and another way of looking at this issue

I agree with Dbmag9 above that implementing this via video files would be less than ideal; IMHO the ideal way would be to have a structured plain-text description of signs, equivalent to IPA for spoken language, and then some way of translating this to video (ideally on the client PC, as this would save bandwidth). Unfortunately, a quick web search found nothing of this sort that wasn't either incomplete or used solely by one piece of non-free software

Another factor to be considered is (in BSL at least) word-order is not the same as in spoken English

As to the whole approach suggested, shouldn't sign language have its own wikipedia, wikiquote, etc. like any other language? I feel it woul be better to have sgn-GB.wikipedia.org and so on than a single, limited wiki. Dprior 20:28, 16 August 2006 (BST)

I think that makes a lot more sense. Daniel (‽) Check out Wikiscope! 19:33, 16 August 2006 (UTC)