Wikipedia American Sign Language

[Valerie Sutton]

SignWriting List
April 21, 2007

Hello Pharos!
Thanks for this message...see mine below...

Pharos wrote:
> 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.

Ha! Yes. Not too controversial would be good! And this is a good  
lead. Thanks for this. A summary is a great idea.

At first I thought maybe we should write an article about a Deaf hero  
or heroine...A famous successful Deaf person who might be mentioned  
in Wikipedia...

So Adam and Cherie and anyone else who has volunteered, can you  
choose the article to translate? Go to:

http://en.wikipedia.org/

and search for a topic, like:

American Sign Language
or
Gallaudet University
or
something with no connection to deafness!
or
whatever you wish...

and decide yourselves on the article you wish to be the first example  
of an encyclopedic article written in ASL...something we can show to  
the world as the first article in an ASL Encyclopedia...

Then you need to decide together who will take which paragraph to  
translate and write in SignText...

Then start adding it, in short clips, one document after the other,  
in the ASL Literature Puddle online. We can also make a separate  
Puddle just for the encyclopedia work...I will do that later today  
for you...

Write again when you have chosen the article you will start with!

Val ;-)