User talk:Slevinski

Hoi,
Welcome to the Meta project for the Wikimedia Foundation. I hope that your involvement with everything wiki will be as successful as it is already promising. Thanks, GerardM 07:38, 12 November 2008 (UTC)

DeafWikimedia Sicilian

hi, I'm a Deaf Wikimedian sicilian.. I would like to create "ise.wikimedia.org".. but I do not know how to do?? ise is for Italian Sign Language (LIS).. --SurdusVII 09:07, 10 November 2014 (UTC)

Greetings SurdusVII. I am unfamiliar with using language code on "wikimedia.org" and do not know how to set that up. There is a test Wikipedia for Italian Sign Language at https://incubator.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wp/ise. Adding content requires a SignWriting editor. The ASL Wikipedia content was created with SignPuddle Online. There are several options for creating content such as SignPuddle Online and SignWriter Studio. I know that Yair Rand is working on another editor that is keyboarding based. I am currently finalizing the TrueType fonts and a low-level JavaScript Library. I will be using these two components to build a new and improved SignWriting editor. Using SignWriting is getting easier all of the time. I believe all of the pieces will finally come together next year and written sign language will explode online. Regards, -Slevinski (talk) 14:09, 10 November 2014 (UTC)

The Community Wishlist Survey

Hi,

You get this message because you’ve previously participated in the Community Wishlist Survey. I just wanted to let you know that this year’s survey is now open for proposals. You can suggest technical changes until 11 November: Community Wishlist Survey 2019.

You can vote from November 16 to November 30. To keep the number of messages at a reasonable level, I won’t send out a separate reminder to you about that. /Johan (WMF) 11:24, 30 October 2018 (UTC)

bzs Wikipedia

Hello @Slevinski:, how are you?

I found today that you released a project to create an Wiki in the Brazilian Sign Language. I'm Brazilian and I think that it is very interesting - I didn't even knew that "Libras" have an writing system! Sadly, I don't know this language, but I want to help this project. There's a way how? Is possible to translate articles from Portuguese into BSL? I'd like to bring articles about interesting subjects/characters from Brazil. Thanks, Erick Soares3 (talk) 00:19, 18 January 2019 (UTC)

Hi @Erick Soares3: SignWriting is used extensively in Brazil. At last count, there are 18 federal universities and 12 public schools in Brazil using SignWriting. In 2018, there were 3 multi-state conferences in Brazil focused on SignWriting. The Brazilian Sign Language Wikipedia started last year with a few articles. The user base continues to grow every year.

If you do not know Libras, it would be difficult for you to translate articles. If you are interested in helping move the projects forward, check out my entry on IdeaLab: The SignWriting Team and Written Sign Language Projects. I tried to outline the scope of the projects and include the relevant details. Regards, -Slevinski (talk) 14:25, 18 January 2019 (UTC)

Thanks! Erick Soares3 (talk) 22:58, 18 January 2019 (UTC)

bzs Wikipedia

Screenshot

Hi friend Slevinski. I am Brazilian, I am not deaf, I contribute to Wikipedia in Portuguese (see also my user page), and I was amazed by your proposal to create Wikipedias in sign languages. I know a bit of LIBRAS, and would be happy to contribute with Wiktionary and a little with Wikipedia. But when I visited the wiki test articles, I saw that there was a problem with the orientation of the signs here on my smartphone (probably not on computers). The problem is that the Wikipedia logo and the "menu" appear horizontally and the signs vertically (see screenshot.) It would not be possible to make the signs appear horizontally as in this Bible in SignWriting? Congratulations on the proposal, you will be helping a lot of people. And forgive me if my English is incorrect, I'm using Google Translator. EnaldoSS (talk) 14:06, 3 February 2019 (UTC)

Thanks for your interest. The sign language wikipedias on incubator are tailored for desktop. The mobile experience is not really available yet. SignWriting is written vertically because this was requested by the deaf themselves. When reading SignWriting, it is really important to quickly determine the left vs the right side of a sign. When signs are written vertically, left and right are easily apparent and this improves reading speed. When written horizontally, each sign must be analyzed for left versus right sides and this slow down reading. Additionally, vertical writing can use an advanced writing technique called lanes which is used for obvious body weight shifts to the left or to the right. -Slevinski (talk) 15:25, 4 February 2019 (UTC)

Sign Language Lexemes

Hi Steve. I'm working with lexemes in Wikidata. Briefly, they are words of a given language (for example: ama/𒂼, laranja and cat). Some lexemes for sign languages (like this one) have been added. I saw some of the British Sign Language lexemes were being added and I started adding some of Libras as well. They are all being added as FSW codes, the same that are used in the test wikis of Incubator. However, in Wikidata they aren't being shown as proper signs like in Incubator. So, what makes possible to properly visualize the sign language texts in those test projects? And, would it be possible (or easy) to implement that to Wikidata? Or at least to the lexeme namespace in it? It would be great to read the signs like they appear in Incubator and not just their codes. Thank you in advance. Enaldodiscussão 00:17, 7 July 2021 (UTC)

Hi Enaldo. Thanks for the interest. The sign language wikipedias work using a special plugin that scans the page for words that match a regular expression. For every word that matches the FSW regular expression, it replaces the word with a call to the SignWriting Icon Server available on wmflabs.org. I'm not sure how this would translate to Wikidata. This is an older technique.

If you would like to use this technique on an individual basis, you can add the signwriting_viewer.js file to your personal common.js page.

We are currently using the Sutton SignWriting Web Components. In order to display a sign in FSW, you can wrap the word with a custom element tag, such as <fsw-sign>AS1ea51S15a37S20e00S26a07M529x524S15a37472x489S1ea51486x491S26a07508x476S20e00480x512</fsw-sign>. To enable the custom components, you need to add a script tag to the HTML page.

I do have a design for a two-dimensional font for SignWriting, but I haven't completed the work yet. I did apply for a grant from the Wikimedia Foundation, but I was declined. This would be the best technique, but it isn't available yet. -Slevinski (talk) 03:02, 7 July 2021 (UTC)

@EnaldoSS: I often see your efforts show up in the Lexemes Challenge -- keep up the good work!

Steve: Thanks for the user script, if I can get it working it will be quite handy. Right now it seems to load the symbol version for me and then revert to the ASCII almost immediately (with d:user:Arlo Barnes/common.js). Arlo Barnes (talk) 03:29, 28 May 2022 (UTC)

@Arlo Barnes: Thank you so much! I'm using this one, and it's working great for me. Enaldodiscussão 13:07, 19 June 2022 (UTC)

Nice. Thanks for the link. Slevinski (talk) 16:05, 19 June 2022 (UTC)

Unicode support for sign writing

Hello User:Slevinski,

Hope this message finds you well. I’m Srishti and I work in the Language and Product Localization team at the Wikimedia Foundation. I recently shared a note in one of the Wikimedia community channels about our renewed membership with the Unicode Consortium, inviting folks to share any requests we could help advocate for: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/WMF_membership_with_Unicode_Consortium.

I came across mentions of your work around getting better Unicode support for SignWriting. From what I gathered, while Unicode has encoded a set of symbols, it currently doesn’t provide a way to combine them to form words, which makes it difficult to use for actual writing. As a result, projects like sign language Wikipedias in the Incubator and sign language lexemes in Wikidata are relying on an ASCII-based encoding along with user scripts for proper display.

I wanted to reach out to see if you’re still actively working on this topic. I’d really appreciate learning more about your past efforts, what approaches you’ve tried, what kind of feedback you received from Unicode, and what progress has been made so far.

I’m also curious, does addressing this primarily require Unicode-level changes, or is it more of a font/rendering problem? And from your perspective, how many sign language Wikimedia projects could benefit if this were improved?

If earlier attempts didn’t fully succeed, would you be open to exploring this again together and potentially putting forward a renewed proposal to Unicode?

Looking forward to hearing your thoughts. SSethi (WMF) (talk) 00:26, 9 April 2026 (UTC)

Hi @Srishti,

Thank you for reaching out. I appreciate your interest in SignWriting and its support within Unicode and Wikimedia projects.

I’m still actively working in this area. You can find an overview of my recent efforts and ongoing work on my website: https://steveslevinski.me

Your questions touch on several important and nuanced aspects of the current challenges, including encoding, rendering, and practical usage across platforms. Rather than trying to cover everything in a long written response, I think a conversation would be the most effective way to share context, past approaches, and where things currently stand.

I’d be happy to meet over Zoom. I’m based in the U.S. Central Time Zone. If you’d like to set up a time, feel free to contact me at slevinski@signwriting.org and we can coordinate a meeting.

I look forward to continuing the conversation.

Regards,

-Slevinski (talk) 03:36, 9 April 2026 (UTC)