Roch-Ambroise Auguste B ébian

[Gerard Meijssen]

Hoi,

In a recent mail Mr Bebian was mentioned. Yes, he does have a Wikipedia
article in English French and German [1] and in the English article many of
his books are mentioned. As Mr Bebian has Wikipedia articles in multiple
languages, there is an "item" for him in Wikidata [1]. The links to these
articles are at the bottom of the information about him.

There are two opportunities for you; the first is that you add his name in
American Sign Writing to this item in Wikidata. The second opportunity is
to make sure that there is a sign for him in any other SIGN language.

For the first opportunity you have to create a #Babel template on your user
page on Wikidata. Copy the one on my user page [2] and modify as needed.

For the second opportunity, you want to know that the Language committee of
the Wikimedia Foundation changed its policy; any ISO-639-3 recognised
language is eligible for using Wikidata [3]. This means that if YOUR sign
language is not enabled, you can request it. It will be quickly granted
eligibility and it is then a technical matter of enabling YOUR language.

There are several reasons why this is of interest, the WMF is in the
process of changing its search engine behaviour and considers including the
information that can be found in Wikidata. This means that they will
support any language that is enabled in Wikidata, It means that when a new
Wikipedia is created in American Sign Language, all the Wikidata items with
ASE labels will be included in the search.

There is already a hack that does exactly this !!

In conclusion.. Wikidata does provide information about more subjects than
any Wikipedia has articles. It just needs labels in YOUR language to do its
job. If Steve or Valerie is interested in cooperation between Wikidata and
Signpuddle, it would make for a really interesting side project. Such a
project could become a Google Summer of Code project and have a student
work on it (for some money) for three months. <grin> yes, Steve will need
to be the mentor of such a project </grin>
Thanks,
       Gerard


[1] https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q2160203
[2] https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/User:GerardM
[3] http://blog.wikimedia.org/2013/11/06/any-language-allowed-in-wikidata/

________________________________________________


SIGNWRITING LIST INFORMATION

Valerie Sutton
SignWriting List moderator
sutton at signwriting.org

Post Messages to the SignWriting List:
sw-l at listserv.valenciacollege.edu

SignWriting List Archives & Home Page
http://www.signwriting.org/forums/swlist

Join, Leave or Change How You Receive SW List Messages
http://listserv.valenciacollege.edu/cgi-bin/wa?SUBED1=SW-L&A=1
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://listserv.linguistlist.org/pipermail/sw-l/attachments/20131107/85e269d7/attachment.htm>