Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Cambodia

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 WikiProject Southeast Asia This article is within the scope of WikiProject Southeast Asia, a project to improve Wikipedia's articles on Southeast Asia-related subjects. Please participate by editing the article, and help us assess and improve articles to good and 1.0 standards, or visit the wikiproject page for more details.
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WikipediaWikiProject Cambodia is part of WikiProject Cambodia, a project to improve all Cambodia-related articles. The wikiproject is also a part of the Counteracting systematic bias group on wikipedia aiming to provide a wider and more detailed coverage on countries and areas of the encyclopedia which are notably less developed than the rest.If you would like to help improve this and other Cambodia-related articles, please join the project. All interested editors are welcome.
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Cambodia To-do:

Contents

[edit] Cambodia discussion from Wikipedia:WikiProject Council/Proposals

Description : This is a wikiproject for those interested in Cambodia, its people, its art and culture. This is to bring wikipedians together to make Cambodia more important in wikipedia. For those interested in Angkor Wat, or anything regarding Cambodian Culture please contribute.

Temporary Project Page
Wikipedia:WikiProject Cambodia

Interested Wikipedians (please add your name)

  1. CanCanDuo 04:22, 1 January 2007 (UTC))
  2. NeoApsara 05:10, 11 January 2007 (UTC)
  3. Cantharellus 00:56, 21 January 2007 (UTC)
  4. LaNicoya 02:12, 4 March 2007 (UTC)
  5. Chris 08:24, 5 March 2007 (UTC)
  6. Melanochromis 11:42, 5 March 2007 (UTC) Happy to help!! I have been maintaining Cambodia Portal for several months already.
  7. --William Thweatt Talk | Contribs 16:31, 5 March 2007 (UTC) been maintaining Cambodia and adding to Khmer language as well as Khmer Royalty and history.
  8. Paxse 16:35, 22 April 2007 (UTC)
  9. Trilinguist Trilinguist 12:10, 17 June 2007 (UTC)
  10. --CloutierFan02 08:44, 18 July 2007 (UTC)

Comments:

  • This is, in theory, a good idea. But it will have to be kept to some academic standards. I've been hoping for more educated Wikipedians taking an interest in Cambodia and adding to the articles. However, I find most of the people wishing to contribute to the Cambodia/Khmer articles are not familiar with WP:V, WP:NOR, or WP:RS. Most, in fact, seem to be Khmer high school students who add legends or beliefs as fact or Khmer POV pushers who blame the Thai or the Vietnamese for all of Cambodia's problems throughout history and want to remove anything percieved as "negative" from the articles. With so few academics specializing in Southeast Asia here at Wikipedia (or anywhere for that matter), I'm afraid that having a project like this will group those sorts of people into one place, giving them the power to dominate consensus. While projects are excellent vehicles for article improvement when there are many academics around, I fear, in this case, it may serve to bring down the quality of the articles. Please convince me otherwise, because I am excited about the opportunity to work with others to constructively build the Khmer-related articles.--William Thweatt Talk | Contribs 16:31, 5 March 2007 (UTC)
  • Hi William. Just want to let you know that I share your idea. We, as a wikiproject, have to prove ourselves be as much academic and neutral as possible. Unfortunutely, we Southeast Asian were taught and raised up in strong nationalistic and ethno-centric environments. As a Thai person, I have seen many nationalist-go-ugly kind of comments countless times, from Thai, Khmer, or other people. It is sad that this kind of thinking takes over academic standards sometimes. So, I think this issue has to be addressed somehow in the project page and make it clear that what our standards are. This is particularly crucial, as there are many online sources or even some mainstream Southeast Asian media that promote nationalist versions of history over the academic ones. It should be made clear that those sources are, in most cases, not credible or citable. Cheers. --Melanochromis 18:55, 5 March 2007 (UTC)
We have the exact same problem with WikiProject Myanmar (Burma). The high schoolers and those wishing to honestly contribute we encourage and direct as per Wikipedia method. Much more insidious is our resident POV pusher, made all the more so that our repeated attempts to bring sanction so that he acts reasonably have fallen on deaf ears. This is particularly bad as the nation is not free, and in our project this takes up a lot of time cleaning up after him, or fighting his constant attacks, that we could be spending doing something productive. If you can find some way to enforce a standard, please, we want in! Chris 06:52, 6 March 2007 (UTC)

I'm excited about this Wikiproject and I think it's great that Khmer kids are using and editing Wikipedia - just what we need to make WP more culturally diverse. That's well worth the trouble of a few extra reverts here and there :) I think we all need to gently educate these kids about the purpose and guidelines of Wikipedia. Look forward to working with you all on Cambodia articles. Paxse 16:35, 22 April 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Missing articles

I'm working up a stub for the missing article on Queen (Mother) Monineath - hope some of you will help work on it once it's up. I've also been hunting for information on Tem Im and Pok Thiem. So far the only references I can find on them (in print or web) are in the wikipedia Cambodia scouting article. If anyone has any information on them I'd be happy to work up a start article. If not, perhaps these two people are not really notable enough for wikipedia? What do others think? I'd also welcome additional suggestions for new articles - let's build up that list! Paxse 05:04, 1 May 2007 (UTC)

I intended to create that article a few years ago after Princess Bopha Devi, but finding reliable or veriable information the Mother Queen of Cambodia is difficult (and even for Bopha Devi). Have you know, there are some old rumors about her that many Cambodians do not even bothering questioning, like the one which claims she is is Vietnamese (apparently, being Vietnamese is not well regarded by ultra nationalist Cambodians). Just a warning if you decide to get information from online sites (which no one should in the first place). --Dara 17:43, 30 June 2007 (UTC)
Hey Dara, Sok sabai? pleased to finally 'meet' you after seeing your name around a lot. You do great work on Cambodia articles. Yes I hear those rumours often. I've picked up a copy of Julio Jeldres work on the royal family and there is some good online stuff on the King Father's website and a few others. I've just been too busy to get it finished. Maybe tomorrow (will be Sunday here). Cheers, Paxse 18:14, 30 June 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Update - new articles

I'm feeling a little masochistic so I am going to start writing some of the district articles for Cambodia's 183 administrative districts. The first one is up at Veal Veang (district). Any feedback, help or suggestions would be welcome.
Also the Queen mother's article is under construction at User:Paxse/Sandbox. I'm waiting for a colour supplement in the paper on Monday (18/6) for her birthday to help me flesh it out a little. Paxse 17:53, 13 June 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Scouting in Khmer script

Text for both scouts and guides in Khmer script have been uploaded to commons for use in articles. Cheers Paxse 13:16, 15 June 2007 (UTC)

Scouting/guiding in Khmer script
Scouting/guiding in Khmer script
Cambodian Scouts in Khmer script
Cambodian Scouts in Khmer script
Thank you so much! Chris 21:30, 15 June 2007 (UTC)


Thank you and for your contributions! Can you render "Be Prepared", the Scout Motto, into Khmer script? Thanks once again! Chris 14:12, 7 August 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Working on Khmer Cuisine page

With such limited sources and records online about Khmer Cuisine, I am at a fork in the things I should/want to write about because I base all of my views on personal accounts rather than citing a specific source. Khmer Gastronomies are very limited online and so if I must, I will write based on my own experience (NOT opinion) and observations but I first need to know if that is acceptable. As for the pictures, they are well on their way and I am doing all I can to upload them. We all know how near worthless an article is without pictures so please be patient because I intend to post many dishes on Khmer Cuisine.

I also want to localize or rather translate some of the Khmer articles from English but I am afraid that might not be best and left to native Khmer speakers. I am not the best when it comes to composing in khmer so I am fine with any assistance or correction. Trilinguist 12:24, 17 June 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Including Khmer and Romanization in Cambodia-related articles

If there is no commonly used English name, use an accepted transliteration of the name in the original language. Latin-alphabet languages, like Spanish or French, should need no transliteration, but Chinese names can use Pinyin, for example.

– Wikipedia:Naming conventions (use English)

  • Non-English words in the English-language Wikipedia should be written in italics. Non-English words should be used as titles for entries only as a last resort.
  • English title terms with foreign origin can encode the native spelling and put it in parentheses.
  • The native text is useful for researchers to precisely identify ambiguous spellings, especially in tonal languages that do not transliterate well into the Roman alphabet.
  • Foreign terms within the article body do not need native text if they can be specified as title terms in separate articles.

– Wikipedia:Guide to writing better articles

So when it comes time to use a transliteration system, please check out the UNGEGN romanization table. It is perhaps the best one to use. See also Romanization of Khmer http://www.eki.ee/wgrs/rom1_km.pdf --Dara 17:22, 30 June 2007 (UTC)

From my experience with articles on Thai topics - the romanization is really a pain. And for Thai there is an officially endorsed romanization scheme, but even Thai authorities quite often use their own scheme. Adding the Khmer script to articles on Khmer topics is something really needed, and IMHO the only reasonable way is to use Unicode - the alternative of images is both much more work, does not scale for printing, and last but not least makes it impossible for search engines to grab it and allow searches in Khmer. Only advantage of images is the fact that it works even with computers who don't have any Khmer font, but IMHO anyone interested enough into Khmer topics to be able to read it will have such a font. And now Thai is standard in Windows fonts, few years ago one still had to download special fonts, maybe for Khmer it'll be same with time. Another hint around the native script: When I have the Thai spelling of terms within an article, but having it displayed in the article would clutter the reading of it too much and it's not really relevant, I put it into the Wiki source text with HTML comments around it, so that the info is saved and available for later use, but does not hinder the reading of the article.
As most of edits were on administrative subdivisions - provinces and districts - it might be a good idea to work on articles describing the structure first before going into detail with the articles on the districts etc. itself. So the article describing srok well enough to allow someone not familiar with the administrative system of Cambodia would be much more helpful than lots of short articles on the districts. This would be especially helpful for "oddities" in the administrative system - e.g. the fact that in Thailand the municipalities are totally independent from the hierarchical system province-district-subdistrict-village, sometimes a whole subdistrict is also a municipal area, sometimes even villages can be only partially belong to municipalities. It took quite some time till I grasp this, and thus write the articles accordingly. Also having a common outline for the district or province articles also makes them easier to access - I humbly point to the way I did for the Thai provinces and districts. I tried my luck with Banteay Meanchey and Thpong (district) already, any comments? However I am still too busy with the Thai articles to help here much. andy 18:54, 13 July 2007 (UTC)
Good point Andy, I've started expanding the geographic term articles a little with Phum and created Srok Krong and Khan which were missing. Khet is a rather confusing case that first leads to a dab page and then back to the list of provinces without really explaining the term - so I've left it alone for now. I still need to add a lot more. The Banteay Meanchey article looks excellent and I like the format for the Thai districts you used for Thpong. Cheers, Paxse 17:18, 29 July 2007 (UTC)

[edit] A Census of Cambodian Articles

How many articles about Cambodia are on En Wikipedia? A damn good question indeed. For the past few week I've been sifting and searching, delving through categories and crawling through Google to find every article on Cambodia that we have. I think this is the place to start organising project work. At the moment I'm transferring articles from my swollen watchlist to List of Cambodia-related topics and tagging them with the wikiproject tag which places them in [[Category:WikiProject Cambodia articles]]. This will make it possible to find a relatively complete list of Cambodian articles to work with. Check out the project category - Currently, we have 301 articles - up from 37 a few days ago! Paxse 19:13, 6 July 2007 (UTC)

One of the requested articles on the WikiProject Cambodia page is for Preah Khan (Sacred Sword)-- but there is a good and really extensive article for Preah Khan already up... I'm just sayin' maybe it can be taken off the list! Fathomharvill 00:18, 25 October 2007 (UTC)
No objections, so I took it off the listFathomharvill 04:11, 9 November 2007 (UTC)
  • Results. We now have 638 titles in the category minus one template and two categories which gives us 635 Cambodian related articles on En Wikipedia. Next, I need to work out how to grade them :( Paxse 14:36, 8 July 2007 (UTC)
By "grade", do you mean "assess"? I can probably do the quality assessments. For importance assessments, Cambodia and the immediate subarticles should probably all be "top" importance, and the others other grades based on their relative importance to Cambodia specifically. John Carter 15:23, 8 July 2007 (UTC)
Howdy John. That would be great. Yeah I mean quality assessment. The sub cats for stub, start etc don't seem to be doing their thing. Chris (Kinetsbuffalo) assessed Scouting in Cambodia as 'start' class I think, but I get an edit screen when I try to browse the cat. We also need one of those groovy coloured boxes to keep track of how many articles are in each class and some criteria for assessment. I'm surprised to see we have two former FA's and a couple of good GA candidates as well. I'd also like to have a sub-stub class for the one line articles with no refs - they are in danger of being speedied any day. Any and all help gratefully received :) Cheers, Paxse 19:09, 8 July 2007 (UTC)
Assessment is now set up. Unfortunately, there isn't a standard way of marking "sub-stubs", and I don't know how any of the other projects that might have that do so. I do know that I could add a Category:Cambodia articles needing attention, which could include those articles and any others that need immediate attention. Would that be sufficient? John Carter 20:36, 8 July 2007 (UTC)
John, you are incredible - once I get a Project Cambodia Barnstar created - you're first on the list, consider this an IOU. That all looks great including the needs attention cat above. Paxse 04:39, 9 July 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Southeast Asian cinema task force

The Southeast Asian cinema task force was recently started as a joint project of WikiProject Films and WikiProject Southeast Asia. Editors who are writing about the Cambodian films are welcome to join the project, where they will find support for collaboration on new articles and the expansion and promotion of existing articles. — WiseKwai 11:29, 1 December 2007 (UTC)

[edit] article assessment

I just assessed about 400 or 500 articles to kickstart the classification system. I'm not an expert so if you want to change any of my best guesses, feel free. Calliopejen1 (talk) 22:53, 13 February 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Tourism industry spam problem

I just want to give everybody a "heads up" on my intentions. All of the articles related to Cambodia appear to have been infiltrated (in some cases written entirely) by representatives of the tourism industry. I'm not just talking about the external links. The article on Siem Reap, for example, mentions the number of hotels in the town in the lead paragraph and almost every province article has the sentence "...has become a major tourist destination" in the lead. Other articles are almost entirely made up of list of "tourist attractions" with subjective terms like "beautiful lake", "luxurious white sandy shores", etc.

No other country's articles are written like this. If tourism is important to an area it needs to be described in an encyclopedic manner in the appropriate section (usually "economy") and not read as a tourist brochure. I plan to remove all such content on sight and would appreciate any help/cooperation.--William Thweatt Talk | Contribs 16:52, 28 February 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Development of province articles

I would like to see an effort by this project (if anybody is still participating) to develop the province articles. They have been rated as "high importance" to the project yet most remain as stubs. I have begun with Ratanakiri Province, adding substantial content, wikification, removing spam, and adding some source material/references. It still needs a lot more work to be comprehensive (history of province, more cited refs, etc.). Most effective wikiprojects have organized efforts, what does everyone think about making the development of the province articles our first organized effort?--William Thweatt Talk | Contribs 16:52, 28 February 2008 (UTC)

Wow, either nobody looks at this page anymore or nobody's on board with my idea. Some feedback would be nice. :) --William Thweatt Talk | Contribs 22:39, 4 March 2008 (UTC)
I agree this should be a priority. I'm happy to help and would like to start with Koh Kong Province. It would be helpful to use this section you have started here to share resources and to develop some continuity in the organisation of articles on the provinces and their districts. Civilaffairs (talk) 16:26, 21 April 2008 (UTC)Civilaffairs
I just did an enormous expansion of the Ratanakiri Province article. There are many great resources I discovered that should help with information for all provinces, especially the provincial data bank and the official tourist sites (check the sources at the bottom of the article). Mangostar (talk) 12:44, 1 May 2008 (UTC)
Thanks, Magostar. Great job on Ratanakiri, by the way. Your resources will certainly be a big help to us all. The problem I had right away with Koh Kong Province was that the latest population figures for some of the districts were from 1998. I looked at some sites where statisticians argued that later population estimates for these districts were extremely unreliable, and they seemed to have very good points. That left me with the question of whether to use 1998 figures or go with unreliable estimates. I wondered if other provinces/districts had similar problems and, if so, how we would find a consistent approach to presenting population figures.Civilaffairs (talk) 15:30, 1 May 2008 (UTC)Civilaffairs
I don't know. I included an estimate for 2004 for the overall population, because I figured 10 years is quite out of date.... There is a census happening in this year (they're every 10 years), so if we just wait a bit the problem will resolve itself. Mangostar (talk) 14:56, 2 May 2008 (UTC)
Well, I guess it's true that great minds think alike because that is what I was thinking, too (grin). At the time I looked at province articles which had been filled out a bit, I didn't see one that had population figures at all, and I wanted to be consistent with other provinces when giving population figures. I may have to use 1998 figures for Koh Kong districts and villages, and then note the 2004 estimate for the overall province or something like that. Thanks again for your help. Civilaffairs (talk) 15:16, 2 May 2008 (UTC)Civilaffairs

[edit] Thai naming of a Khmer temple

May I draw the attention of a user with knowledge in Khmer script to Talk:Sdok Kak Thom. We are unsure, where the name of Sdok Kak Thom (or "Sadok Kok Thom"?) - an old Khmer temple in Thailand - originates. And could maybe someone provide us with a Khmer script of that name? Thank you. --hdamm (talk) 13:28, 20 May 2008 (UTC)

I am not Cambodian and fear I have forgot most what little I once knew of the Khmer script and language. Good question about where the name originates. Chandler's book refers to the inscription quite a few times, but I have not been able to find in his book where the name actually originates. (It may be in there, but I just have not found it.)
"Sdok" (Sdach, Sadok, etc) translates as "king". "Thom" of course means "great" or "big". "Kak" I am not sure of. I gave away all my old Khmer books to a Cambodian family here in the States who wanted to teach their children to read and write Khmer, so I can't look it up easily. I'm guessing it may simply translate as "The Great Kings" or "About the Great Kings" or something like that, and be the "title" of the inscription rather than having any special origin. But that is only a guess.
I hope someone more helpful than I will turn up for you. If not, you might try emailing Dr. Chhany Sak-Humphry at the University of Hawaii: email address given for inquiries about the Sdok Kak Thom inscription at the bottom of this page. Civilaffairs (talk) 18:39, 20 May 2008 (UTC)Civilaffairs
Thank you very much, Civilaffairs, for your contribution. So your translation is one more aspect of several others (see article and talk page) ;-)
We would also like to know the original Khmer script. --hdamm (talk) 16:04, 26 May 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Draft Guidelines for Lists of companies by country - Feedback Requested

Within WikiProject Companies I am trying to establish guidelines for all Lists of companies by country, the implementation of which would hopefully ensure a minimum quality standard and level of consistency across all of these related but currently disparate articles. The ultimate goal is the improvement of these articles to Featured List status. As a WikiProject that currently has one of these lists within your scope, I would really appreciate your feedback! You can find the draft guidelines here. Thanks for your help as we look to build consensus and improve Wikipedia! - Richc80 (talk) 21:09, 25 May 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Peer review please!

Hi everyone, I think I may try for FA with Ratanakiri Province soon. I put it up for comments at Wikipedia:Peer review/Ratanakiri Province/archive1; if you have any feedback, please post there! thanks, Mangostar (talk) 20:51, 2 June 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Help with Cambodia cities/towns/villages and their disambiguation.

Greetings! There is a proposal to organize a bot in order to create thousands upon thousands (if not eventually -- a million) articles related to villages/towns/cities from around the world. Cambodia is also a part of this and there is a list of places from Cambodia found here: Wikipedia:WikiProject Missing encyclopedic articles/Places/cambodia. Currently however, before the project can begin, the list of places need to be checked for disambiguation. That is, there are some blue links already created and they need to be checked to ensure that they are in fact already the created cityand not a disambiguation page. This is needed as the bot will not be able to create the place if there is already a blue link and if its a disambiguation page, then that place (be it a city, village or town) will miss out. That is why I ask anyone here from this project who has some time or knowledge of Cambodia to have a look and help if they want in any way they can. As a side note, there is also a discussion going on here at the village pump: Wikipedia:Village pump (proposals)/FritzpollBot and you are more than welcome to state your views on it. There is also a FAQ that you may have a look at User:FritzpollBot/FAQ but if you have any question do get in contact with Fritzpoll here User talk:Fritzpoll or with Biofield here User talk:Blofeld of SPECTRE. Kind regards.Calaka (talk) 04:57, 3 June 2008 (UTC)