User talk:Kborland

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[edit] Welcome

You're from Nakhon Pa Mak, right? Hope you will enlarge that article with more information on your home-tambon. The main focus here is not to have a photo gallery (though of course representative photos for a town are welcome), but the text, for example some history of your that tambon, the temples etc. Normally one photo would be enough in the article, and additional photos can be put to a gallery on Wikipedia:Commons - which is anyway the better place for uploading your own photos, as they can then be used in e.g. the Thai wikipedia directly as well.

If you need any technical help, feel free to ask me, I work a lot on the Thai topics here, but there's always more need in native Thai to help. andy 11:35, 5 October 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Harrison County link

Please do not add links to your own website to articles; it is considered spam and original research. Nyttend 04:28, 8 October 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Moving articles

Sorry for not getting back to you earlier, I am quite busy with my Amphoe project adding all the references from the Royal Gazette, and in that turn correct the sometimes sloppy Amphoe histories from http://www.amphoe.com. That'll probably keep me busy for some more weeks (or even months). You're quite fast to create new good contents, if you continue in that pace Phitsanulok will soon be better covered than my favourite province Surat Thani. But I am impaired by my bad Thai language skills, though I learn it for some years already I can only "read" Thai texts with copy-and-paste to an online dictionary. But let's list some of the points which might be of help for you:

  • To move an article to a new place, simply use that "move" tab on top of the article. Help:Move gives the full explanation
  • The geotags you added are great, but normally an accuracy of 1 arcsecond (which equals about 30 m) is enough. For the administrative entities like the Amphoe I used the location of the Thiwagan Amphoe - as the traffic signs point to that one as well it's IMHO the best choice to represent an area with a single dot. So for a tambon the building of the TAO could be a good central point, don't know what should one use for a muban, but maybe then a simple point in the middle of the settlement is also fine. I am still unsure what to use for a National Park - the administration might be located outside the actual park area...
  • It's great to have many references, though IMHO it's not necessary to cite the obvious - so one which say "Google Earth" or "a map" is a bit too much referencing. But that's just my personal feeling, I am not sure what is the actual policy of that.
  • When you write a comment on a Talk page, you should add your "signature" by putting ~~~~ at the end of the comment, which will automagically get expanded to the current date and time and a link back to your user page.
  • A finally about commons - that is a separate Wiki, which collects all the copyright-free (or better to say royalty-free) multimedia things which are to be used in more than one of the language editions of Wikipedia. Especially things like photos belong there, so if someone writes/translates the article on Bang Krathum in e.g. russian the photo of the thiwagan amphoe, the map with the location, the photo of the most beautiful natural spot etc. can be added directly. And commons is also a good place to create galleries of photos for a given topic, for example in Surat Thani I only added a few photos, and at the bottom point to the gallery in commons which has many more photos of less interesting buildings.
  • I guess I have to do a special infobox template for the muban later as well, but for the time being "abusing" the one intended for the tambon is OK.

And you already did the most common way to learn how to edit here - check other articles and see how it was done there and simply copy the code. andy 11:31, 9 October 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Mozilla

Did you switch to Mozilla Firefox yet? --Richard Arthur Norton (1958- ) 04:30, 17 October 2007 (UTC) I was just there at the article, Firefox has a built in real time spell check. Plus it has adblock, so you don't see any ads. --Richard Arthur Norton (1958- ) 06:54, 17 October 2007 (UTC) Don't you go to sleep?

[edit] Ghost

Could you look at Talk:Ghosttown, Oakland, California, we are debating a reference used in the article, and if is should stay or go. Express your own opinion. --Richard Arthur Norton (1958- ) 03:40, 19 October 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Category:WikiProject Phitsanulok Tambon Status

Please, if you could, restrict project tags to talk pages. This is the usual WikiProject convention, and the reason is that projects, and their tags aren't really part of the content itself, and shouldn't be included in CD's, mirrors, or printed versions of the encyclopedia. I've already moved most of them to talk pages, and removed a few categories you had blanked. Let me know if you need any help with anything. -- Prove It (talk) 02:33, 23 October 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Thai romanization

As you probably know, the romanization of Thai words is a pain, with lots of different systems in use. There was a semi-consensus sometime ago (there weren't enough Wikipedians giving their opinion on it to call it a consensus) to use the RTGS as the officially endorsed scheme, even though it has its flaws like not differencing between short and long vocals. I did that for the tambon tables when creating the Amphoe articles, and finally earlier this year the DOPA gave a list of recommended romanizations of the tambon names (see my blog). I would suggest that we do the same for the village lists in your tambon articles. andy 19:23, 4 November 2007 (UTC)

I agree that there should be uniformity. However, I admit I don't have command over any of the standard conventions. I just went by ear (from sight-reading the Thai names and trying to sound them out in latin-alphabet letters), combined with trying to incorporate how I'd seen transcriptions done of similarly spelled words. I would appreciate help in that area if you have some time one of these days. Also, what I feel is a major problem in these names is inconsistent breaking of "words." When I first started, I just did the break after the Ban or Maenam or Bang, Mueang, etc., but then I starting breaking them into separate words where I knew the meaning of a component part (which would have resulted in Ban Dong Phayom, e.g., instead of Ban Dongphayom. I'm not sure what the accepted standard is for that either.Kevin Borland, Esq. 19:30, 4 November 2007 (UTC)
On [1] you can find a software which does the romanization quite well, I have used it for the tambon as well. For the splitting of the name in english - I have no idea what is the rule there, your approach is quite logical. My command of the Thai language is still too bad to confirm such a rule in the romanizations I have encountered before. I can take a look and fix up your transcriptions, but it may take some time till I can do it. I also want to convert your maps to the style of those I have already created (see here), I stopped to create those maps when I started to run into maps with contradicting boundaries and was able to find which one is correct or up to date. andy 22:12, 4 November 2007 (UTC)
Thanks. Yes, I thought the tambon needed maps badly but couldn't find any, so I made my own for Bang Krathum for now. If there are better ones out there, that's fine.Kevin Borland, Esq. 22:15, 4 November 2007 (UTC)
Not yet, but I will work on it :-) andy 12:10, 7 November 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Getting permission for Flickr photos

Simply join Flickr, then send "Flickr mail" to the photographer. This is an example of a letter I send:

Hello, I just came across your very nice photo of the Sichuan dish "zhang cha duck."

http://www.flickr.com/photos/claracasa/139693608/

I'm one of the thousands of volunteer editors at the English-language Wikipedia and write articles about various cuisine items. We have just written a new article about this food, but we don't currently have a photo. I wonder if you might give your permission for your photo to be uploaded to that article, as the representative photo for this drink.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zhang_cha_duck

As per Wikipedia's policies, it would need to be released under a "free" license such as the Creative Commons, meaning that the photo could be reused by anyone for any reason (including educational, commercial, or any other use), although it would be specified that credit is given to you and a link made to your Flickr page.

Please let me know if you'd be amenable to this, and all the best!

-- Wikipedia user:Badagnani

Badagnani 03:15, 5 November 2007 (UTC)

Thanks. Will do. Also found a nice one (that's already free) for the Palaungic on the Peopling of Thailand article.Kevin Borland, Esq. 03:17, 5 November 2007 (UTC)

By the way, I usually upload photos to commons.wikimedia.org rather than en:wikipedia, so more Wikipedias can use the photo. Look here for an example of how to add a license to a photo from Flickr for which the photographer has given his/her permission. As you can see, it's a bit cumbersome because you have to add all the correspondence. Badagnani 03:18, 5 November 2007 (UTC)

These two tools are very useful for uploading to Commons--they basically find the photo and upload it for you:

[edit] Cite

  • <ref>{{cite web |url= |title= |accessdate=2007-10-31 |quote= |publisher= }}</ref>
  • <ref>{{cite book |last= |first= |authorlink= |coauthors= |title= |year= |publisher= |quote= | url= |isbn= }}</ref>
  • <ref>{{cite news |first= |last= |authorlink= |coauthors= |title= |url= |quote= |publisher=[[New York Times]] |date= |accessdate=2007-10-31 }}</ref>

[edit] Joshua

I really don't like the editor's unilateral removals, nor his implication that anyone wishing to keep them (for the reasons you outline) is a fundamentalist. It's not a valid argument, IMO. I appreciate your input and ideas. Badagnani (talk) 07:39, 27 January 2008 (UTC)

Thanks. What I would really hate to see is the data being killed for lack of sources, once the links are killed. About half of the articles would then be unsoursed.Kevin Borland, Esq. (talk) 07:41, 27 January 2008 (UTC)