The other day I wrote about Thai Wikipedia, so I wanted to highlight another cool Wikimedia project: Thai Wiktionary. In a comment on the Thai Wikipedia post, Jason had a great thought:
The gap between Thai Wikipedia and English Wikipedia is an aspiring translator's dream: plenty of material and no penalty for mistakes.
Now, I knew that in theory, but it took him saying that to get me to fully realize it. So I've decided to hone my Thai skills and get more involved. For no real reason, I created an article on Herman Melville (though I focused mostly on a list of his works). I created a "navbox" for the important technological fields, which you can see at the bottom of pages like วิศวกรรมชีวเวช (biomedical engineering). Among other things.
Enter Thai Wiktionary. Very much in its infancy. Little consistency, and as of yesterday, a mere 248 entries. By comparison, English Wiktionary has 551,000, and little ol' Vietnamese Wiktionary has an astounding 225,000 words. So I decided to double Thai's number of entries. And right now it stands at 415. I'm not really that prolific--I added pages for almost 200 Thai abbreviations. I figured that was an easy way to start. Doesn't require much definition (at least not yet), just a single word saying what it stands for. Gets the job done on a basic level. Get involved! The important thing is to look at what's been done and copy the style and the standard.
When Thai Wiktionary hits 1,000 words it moves up to the next bracket on the homepage. I'm thinking an ETA of next week sounds reasonable. Wanna help?
I wonder how many people know about Thai Wikipedia. I recommend it--and I recommend getting involved. I've been a member since July 2006, and while I've only made 100 or so edits, I try to do what I can. Particularly, since I'm not quite confident enough to start full blown articles, I create a lot of redirect pages for things with more than one name, correct obvious typos, interlink with Wikipedias of other languages, and use the Thai info to create or expand English pages about various Thai things, like authors, or the Royal Institute.
On the Wikipedia frontpage, which lists languages in groups by number of articles, Thai is firmly in the 10,000+ group (with 28,135 as of just now). It has more articles than the respective Wikipedia sites of all of mainland Southeast Asia (assuming I'm interpreting their statistics pages correctly):
Vietnamese Wikipedia: 25,150 articles
Malay Wikipedia: 23,659 articles
Khmer Wikipedia: 373 articles
Lao Wikipedia: 228 articles
Burmese Wikipedia: 101 articles
As for the island portions of Southeast Asia, Tagalog Wikipedia has 9,722 articles, and only Indonesian Wikipedia has more than Thai, with 67,922 articles. Some of the other major Asian languages, like Japanese and Chinese, dwarf Southeast Asia's Wikipedias, but things are well on their way. Thai Wikipedia is a great resource, and great language practice.
Let me get you started: here's a link to the article on Bangkok.
