This paper describes a crowdsourcing solution to the problem of data
collection and linguistic fieldwork that can be brought to a halt in
emegency situations, such as a pandemic outbreak, or in crisis zones where
mobility may not be allowed. We present World-Sign, a novel and easy-to-use
multilingual crowd-sourcing web-based platform for the documentation of
Sign languages. Documentation is categorized by continent, country and
region to accommodate regional variation for the same language. The design
of the crowd-sourcing platform takes into account the quality assurance of
the documented signs. World-Sign enables users to login and describe
themselves demographically by country and region and deafness affiliation
(e.g., deaf themselves, have deaf parents (CODA). As a starting point, the
database of words for which we are seeking signs consists of 2000 words
belonging to 18 semantic domains. Users can choose the language of the
platform (English, French or Arabic) and add their signs using one of the
following four strategies: (1) videotaping a sign using Laptop/Phone cam
(2) checking if similar signs proposed in other sign languages exist on the
platform (3) uploading the sign if it is available in their device (4)
describing the sign using an avatar: this mode operates by having users
describe their signs using a virtual signing avatar
