Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Cambodia/Archive 1

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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)

• Comment: Project is now active at Wikipedia:WikiProject Cambodia.

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)

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)

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

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)

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)

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)

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)

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)