October 20, 2007

More Thai Wikimedia love

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?

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