What's wrong with law.moi.go.th?

One of the Thai government websites which gave me lots of early information on planned administrative changes - especially the municipal upgrades - is the site of the Office of Legal Affairs of the Ministry of Interior (สำนักกฎหมาย สำนักงานปลัดกระทรวงมหาดไทย), found at law.moi.go.th. However, for more than a year already, I get nothing but connection timeouts when I try to open that site. Even services like "Down For Everyone Or Just Me" show it offline. Yet, strangely, Google still is able to access it, so the Google cache is an awkward backdoor to access the site. Even stranger - a month ago I noticed that with the free proxy from hide.me the site was accessible, so luckily I used the chance to download all the new board meeting transcript files then. Because - it seems the webmaster now blocked access by that proxy, it shows a 403 error.

I really wonder what is going on there. Has the Ministry of Interior placed this website behind the planned Great Firewall of Thailand already wrongly set to filter in the wrong direction? Or did just a stupid network administrator screw up the routing tables which effective blocked the site from foreign access? Needless to say that its impossible to notify anyone by email about this problem, the email address on the website is not working, and also all other standard email like webmaster don't work.

Delivery to the following recipient failed permanently:

     law2555@hotmail.co.th

The error that the other server returned was:
550 Requested action not taken: mailbox unavailable

The connectivity problem seems to be not just this one website, also many of the province websites hosted within the MOI don't work either, e.g. Ubon Ratchathani gives timeouts for me but shows online at "Down for everyone".

Would be curious how much the accessibility of law.moi.go.th has been limited, so I invite you to leave a short comment stating whether you can access the site and from where you did.

Pa Sak TAO upgraded to municipality

Today, the upgrade of the subdistrict administrative organization Pa Sak (องค์การบริหารส่วนตำบลป่าสัก) in Lamphun province to a subdistrict municipality (เทศบาลตำบลป่าสัก) was announced in the Royal Gazette. The change became official on November 6, exactly 4 years after the last local election - even though all local elections are still halted and mayor can continue to stay even after their normal term in office ends, in this case the Ministry of Interior timed the update with the end of the electoral term, same as they did in past when it still made sense to avoid too frequent local elections.

The upgrade was discussed in the Board to consider draft laws in their meeting on September 7, thus it was rather quick to be announced in the Gazette given that there are still hundreds of upgrades still not yet published there, waiting for more than eight years already. Maybe this time it was so fast because it was the first and so far only one planned for the fiscal year 2016, and even just the third for the common year 2015.

Though there is no Wikipedia article yet about this local government unit, I have created and filled an item in Wikidata to record the information - and since it is a reference for some of the statements in that item, even this Royal Gazette announcement now has its own Wikidata item.

New district in Chumphon proposed

Thai Wikipedia Potapt notified me about a news report that in Chumphon province plans to create a new district. According to that report, the district Tha Sae (อำเภอท่าแซะ) in the north of the province is too large to be manageable by the district office. In fact, this district is the largest one of Chumphon by ara, and also with 83,293 citizen (December 2014) the second-most populous one after Mueang district - interestingly the news report wrongly claims it is the third. Also, its location at the boundary to Myanmar makes it more difficult to administrated. As the name of the new district "Thepharat" (อำเภอเทพรัตน) is proposed.

Interestingly, the territorial extent in this proposal means that not just some subdistricts get split off to form the new district, but also the subdistrict Rap Ro - number five in the map above and the largest of the subdistricts by area, population and number of administrative villages - should be split between the two new districts. The villages 10, 14, 19, 21 and 23 making up the northern part of the subdistrict would become a new subdistrict and then be part of the new district. This would not just make it the first new subdistrict since 1996 (not counting those in Bangkok), it would also mean that the local government of Rap Ro would either be the first TAO to cover area within two districts, or would have to be split as well.

However, it will still take some time until this district can be created - unlike the two proposed districts in Yala province it even hasn't been discussed in the board to consider draft laws nor by the cabinet of ministers, both steps before the law could proceed.

Pronunciation of the administrative units

The standard romanization using the RTGS standard gives a fair approximation of the correct pronunciation of the Thai names, but with some limitations - both the vocal length and the tone are ignored, and one should not read the romanized name like an English name. The Bang Sue meme only works when reading the romanized name of that Bangkok district like it were written in English. Using the transcription of the Thai names into the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) instead avoids all three problems, then Bang Sue (บางซื่อ) becomes "bāːŋ sɯ̂ː". Also those cases where there seem to be two subdivisions sharing the same name - like the two districts Bang Sai in Ayutthaya province - disappear with this transcription.

• Bang Sai (บางไทร) is read as "bāːŋ sāj".
• Bang Sai (บางซ้าย) is read as "bāːŋ sáːj".

In 2011 an anonymous user added the IPA transcription for several districts into the English Wikipedia, however sadly not to all. While I can do the RTGS romanization myself well already, I just know the basics of IPA, and the tone rules of written Thai are still too confusing for me, so I can neither check those IPA transcriptions nor add new ones. But I could add the IPA into my XML structure, and then run my bot to add those values to the items in WikiData. Though its just one small data field among many others, and its not available for all, at least it now makes that information from Wikipedia directly machine-readable without the need to parse English text. If anyone can provide me with more IPA transcriptions, I'd be happy to make sure these will find their way into Wikidata and Wikipedia...