Wikipedia American Sign Language

[Pharos]

Val, it's great to see your progress on this.  I wish I could help but
unfortunately I'm ignorant of both ASL and Signwriting.  But I might
be able to point you to some good ideas for translation.

Wikipedia's best articles are called "featured articles":

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Featured_articles

You might pick one of these to translate, or at least to translate a
portion of an article.  A good start would be to translate just the
introductory section, which is supposed to be a neat summary of the
whole article.  It might be a good idea to pick an article that
doesn't use too many specialized terms, and that isn't likely to be
controversial.

On 4/20/07, Valerie Sutton <sutton at signwriting.org> wrote:
> 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 ;-)
>
>