ASL Wikipedia general update, and a new SignWriting input method

[Yair Rand]

It's been a while since the ASL Wikipedia work has been mentioned here, so
I figure it's a good time for a general update on the efforts towards
Wikipedias in sign languages.

First off, take a look at the spiffy new ASL Wikipedia main page
<https://incubator.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wp/ase/AS18517S20500S2ff00M529x544S2ff00482x483S20500519x504S18517503x517>.
The design is based off the English Wikipedia main page, and the new
translations/content were provided by Adam Frost.

The ASL Wikipedia has 53 articles, and to the best of my knowledge none of
the other sign language Wikipedias have any. There's still no built-in
editing tool on the Incubator, but you can contribute by copy-pasting
Formal SignWriting (FSW) from elsewhere. To contribute:
1. Log in on the Wikimedia Incubator <https://incubator.wikimedia.org/>. (If
you have an account on any other Wikimedia site you can log in using that.)
If you don't have an account, you can create one by clicking on the "Create
an account" link in the corner of the page. Note that you can have a
username in SignWriting.
2. Go to the Internationalization section of Special:Preferences
<https://incubator.wikimedia.org/wiki/Special:Preferences#mw-htmlform-i18n>,
select "Wikipedia" for "Test wiki", and fill in the ISO 639 code for the
language you want to work on in the "Test wiki language" box. The ISO code
for American Sign Language is "ase", German Sign Language's is "gsg",
LIBRAS's is "bzs", Russian Sign Language: "rsl", British Sign Language:
"bfi", Italian Sign: "ise". You can usually look up a language's ISO 639
code in Wikipedia.
3. Put the title (in FSW) of the page you want to create into the search
box in the corner of the page, press enter, and then click the red link to
create the page.
4. Enter your content into the text box, click the preview button to make
sure it looks alright, and click Save.
And voila, you've created an article on your language's Wikipedia!

On to TranslateWiki work: 427 Mediawiki core messages have been translated
into ASL by Adam Frost. That's 13% of the entire message group, and once
18% has been reached, the ASL interface will be added to the general
distribution, which is required for the a Wikipedia to be moved to its own
domain as a full Wikipedia project. To help with the interface translations
in ASL or any other language, go to TranslateWiki.net
<https://translatewiki.net> and create an account!

On Vertical Writing support in Mediawiki, which is necessary for the sign
language Wikipedias: A Mediawiki architecture meeting was held regarding
Vertical Writing support about six weeks ago, and Brion Vibber from the
Wikimedia Foundation agreed to provisionally look into extending CSSJanus
so that it can rotate the CSS appropriately for vertically-oriented pages.
If you're good with PHP, please consider volunteering to help out with the
CSSJanus work.

(I think Stephen Slevinski has been working on the SignWriting Asset
Provider, but I don't understand that work well enough to summarize it,
unfortunately.)

Finally, I'd like to unveil my new keyboard-based SignWriting input method,
available here
<https://googledrive.com/host/0B1Pz4n6wXAfvT18yOTFoSE5Sa2s/SWKB.html>. (I'm
hosting it at Google Drive until I can figure out a better location.) It's
written in javascript and should work in all major browsers. The script is
still a work-in-progress, and doesn't have all of the symbols yet. Many of
the symbols are not in the best locations (partly because I don't
understand what all of the symbols mean), and there's probably going to be
a lot of bugs in the current version. Please take a look, test it out, and
give lots of feedback. Happy typing. :)

________________________________________________


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