Developing the Thai-language Wikipedia

Currently, there is at best a poor number of Thai language articles on Wikipedia. Compared with English which has 3,691,186 articles (or 6.15 articles per 1000 speakers of English), Thai has 68,126 (or 1.14 articles per 1000 speakers). In comparison, Basque, which has only around a million speakers, has over 100,000 articles. Some constructed languages such as Esperanto and Volapük have more articles than Thai.

What does this mean for Thailand? After all, there may be equivalent resources on the Internet for any given topic. The value of Wikipedia is subtle for those that do not use it every day.

Take an example. You are searching for “biometric identification” on Google in Thai. You will see mostly results that point to companies that sell related products, but no Wikipedia article. If you did the same search in English, the first result listed in the Google search would point to Wikipedia. If you are a Thai speaker, and you want to find out more about the topic, you need to go through many (possibly misleading and likely biased) websites, and you are still unlikely to find an objective article on the topic.

In English-speaking countries, technical people use Wikipedia every day and possibly several  times a day to rapidly learn and research while they work. Without a similar resource, Thai speakers risk falling behind.

Contrast India with Thailand. Hindi has about the same number of Wikipedia articles as Thai, but India has the second-largest population of English speakers in the world. It is likely that some small part of India’s growth in technology-related industry is related to its ability to exploit freely available Internet resources and especially Wikipedia.

Thailand does not have as many English speakers, and so does not have as much access to objective encyclopedic articles as other countries. If Thai-speakers wish to improve their access to such resources, one possible way is to improve the number of Thai language Wikipedia articles.

Currently, the number of articles in Thai is growing, but at a relatively slow, linear rate. This is likely because the number of active contributors is not growing. This needs to change.

This article proposes one possible solution to the paucity of Thai-language Wikipedia articles. It is not a simple solution, and it would require a great deal of cooperation from the Thai Ministry of Education and possibly the Wikipedia Foundation.

The basic idea is to exploit school children as contributors to Wikipedia.

One’s immediate reaction is to wonder what kind of articles school children would likely contribute. Ten thousand poorly-written articles about various pop singers and movie stars are hardly likely to contribute to Thailand’s development.

We would first have to set some requirements for such an endeavor.

1. Creation or update of articles of a technical, scholarly, or newsworthy nature should be given priority.
2. Priority should be given to article topics that are most often referenced or read in other languages on Wikipedia.
3. Articles should meet the Wikipedia manual of style.
4. Articles should not be simple translations of the English language page, but should rather (where appropriate) reference Thai context and other Thai language Wikipedia or external pages.
5. Articles should be reviewed and vetted by a teacher and possibly a Wikipedia expert.
6. Some coordination may be necessary to indicate that a particular topic is being worked on by a particular student to avoid duplication of effort.
7. Students will need to learn about how to write good articles.
8. Teachers of students that write such articles will need to know how to evaluate the quality of articles.
9. Workflow and procedures for publishing articles need to be established that consider the fact that many Thai schools may not have adequate computing resources or internet connectivity to serve all students at once.
10. Teachers, administrators, and government officials should not be held responsible for the accuracy or eventual use of the articles.
11. Articles should be related to what the student is normally being taught.
12. Students of other languages should be given the opportunity to choose less scholarly articles to translate as part of their work.
13. The program needs the cooperation of current Wikipedia Thai language contributors and moderators.