Thai Wikipedia

Thai Wikipedia

Type of site	Internet encyclopedia project
Available in	Thai
Headquarters	Miami, Florida
Owner	Wikimedia Foundation
Created by	Thai wiki community
URL	http://th.wikipedia.org/
Commercial	No
Registration	Optional

The Thai Wikipedia (Template:Lang-th) is the edition of Wikipedia in the Thai language started in December 2003. As of December 6, 2007, it has more than 30,000 articles with 32,000 registered users. As of October 2007, Wikipedia (all languages combined) was ranked 26^th in Alexa Top Sites Thailand .

On January 31, 2006 Thai Wikipedia was first recognized along with English Wikipedia by a press coverage. In 2007 there is a thesis under the name Thai Wikipedia and Communicating Knowledge to the Public by a graduate student from Faculty of Fine and Applied Arts, Chulalongkorn University.

Thai Wikipedia was also mentioned during a public forum in 2005-2006 Thai political crisis telling that Thai people should read all facts about Thaksin Shinawatra, the former prime minister.

Thai Wikipedia is the second online encyclopedia in Thai language after Thai Junior Encyclopedia Project under patronage of King Bhumibol Adulyadej.

Characteristics

The Thai Wikipedia is different from other Wikipedias in a number of ways:

• All edits must comply with Thai law (in particular, Lèse majesté), to account for the fact that the vast majority of contributors live in Thailand.
• The first line of each paragraph is indented in the same way as Thai writing style.

Timeline

Thai Wikipedia statistics as of October 4^th, 2007. Currently there are about 28,000 articles (shown in dots) and 32,000 users (orange bars).

• 25 December 2003: The Thai main page created after first created in 16 March 2003 with the word "Describe the new page here."
• 27 December 2003: The first article created containing only one word "ดาราศาสตร์" (astronomy) and 32 interwiki links. After that it became a stub in 31 May.
• 28 February 2004: The real first article created, Computer science.
• 21 April 2004: 100 articles, Time & Time Travel (a fiction).
• 17 August 2004: 500 articles, Grevillea
• 10 March 2005: 1,000 articles, Harry Potter.
• 1 May 2005: The first featured article, Fractal.
• September 2005: More than 30 university students registered and wrote articles as their homework.
• 28 October 2005: 5,000 articles, Bao Qingtian.
• 31 January 2006: Press coverage in onopen.com
• March 2006: Mass contenting adding of the year articles from 543 BC (Buddhist Era 1) to about 1800 semi-manually by using JavaScript. About 2,500 stubs are added.
• 14 March 2006: 10,000 articles, Pennsylvania State University
• 16 March 2007: 20,000 articles, Aries Mu
• 10 December 2007: 30,000 articles, Andy Lau
• 26 October 2008: 40,000 articles, Bamboo Blade

See also

• Wikipedia

References

• Statistics page of Thai Wikipedia
• Usage statistics from Wikimedia

External links

• Thai Wikipedia Template:Th icon
• Press coverage in onopen.com Template:Th icon