Wikipedia American Sign Language

[Valerie Sutton]

SignWriting List
April 20, 2007

Hello SW List Members!

As you all know, recently there has been interest in creating a  
possible ASL Wikipedia, or at least, the beginning of writing an  
Encyclopedia in ASL...

Since we are new to writing and posting documents on the web, in our  
SignPuddle 1.5 Literature Puddle online, I realize that this is a  
very big leap forward, to start writing encyclopedia articles in ASL!

To write such an article, we would need to either choose an article  
already written in another encyclopedia, and then translate it from  
English to ASL and then write it in SignWriting in SignText...

or...

write it directly from our own knowledge of physics, or geography or  
whatever the article is about!

This seems like a big new project, doesn't it?

Sooo...here is my thought...

Do we have volunteers to help us write one test-article for a new  
encyclopedia written in ASL?

It will be our FIRST article for an encyclopedia in ASL...like a test  
drive. Then we can show the document to those at Wikimedia and to  
others too...It will be an historic and interesting adventure...

I know many of you are already overloaded with projects, so only  
volunteer if you feel you have the time. We could create an  
Encylopedia team of writers, and each person could take a small  
section of the translation and writing...

And there is no rush and no deadline.

Plus we need to choose the one article we want to write...

But before we choose the article, is there anyone interested in  
volunteering to write an article for an Encyclopedia?

Once we have a few volunteers, I will write to the Wikimedia language  
committee to suggest that maybe they can choose one article for us to  
translate from the Wikipedia in English online...

Those are my thoughts...

What are yours?

Val ;-)