Wiki loves monuments

This month several European Wikipedia editions held a collective event titled "Wiki Loves Monuments", in which they tried to give the officially registered monuments a better coverage in Wikipedia, especially taking lots of photos. For Germany, one of the biggest problem was the fact that the registration of monuments is done by the local government units, the municipalities or communes (Städte und Gemeinden). While some feature their monument list rather prominently on their website, or at least publish any changes on their list there. Yet others have nothing like this, and especially for the larger cities the list can be really lengthy - for example for Aachen its a PDF file with 29 pages, thus several hundred of monuments.

Wat Phattanaram

The Thai Wikipedia sadly did not take part in this event, though the compilation of a complete list of monuments would be a much easier task there - as the Thai administration is still much more centralized, its only the Fine Arts Department (กรมศิลปากร) which does the registration of monuments, and these are then published in the Royal Gazette. One simply has to find all the announcements with the term เขตที่ดินโบราณสถาน (area of historical site), which returns a total of 610 PDFs - and a few further with slightly variant titles. I had started to process that list into my XML format quite some time ago, but only for very few of the announcements I added the details in a machine readable format.

As an example, Wat Phattanaram (วัดพัฒนาราม) in Surat Thani town (photo album)has been declared a registered historical site in December 2001 (Gazette announcement). The corresponding entry in my XML looks like this

<entry description="Creation of historical sites in Nakhon Si Thammarat, Surat Thani and Chumphon" 
 title="ประกาศกรมศิลปากร เรื่อง ขึ้นทะเบียนและกำหนดเขตที่ดินโบราณสถาน (วัดชายนา วัดท่าพญา วัดพัทธสีมา จังหวัดนครศรีธรรมราช, วัดเขาพระอานนท์ วัดพัฒนาราม จังหวัดสุราษฎร์ธานี และ วัดสวี จังหวัดชุมพร)" 
 volume="118" page="10-11" issue="พิเศษ 127 ง" uri="2544/E/127/10.PDF" publication="2001-12-21" sign="2001-08-29">
  <createpark index="5" type="HistoricalSite" name="วัดพัฒนาราม" english="Wat Phattanaram" 
   locationgeocode="840101" arearai="1.2575">
    <geo:Point>
      <geo:lat>9.1486</geo:lat>
      <geo:long>99.3290</geo:long>
    </geo:Point>
  </createpark>
</entry> 

There is much more to discover in the Royal Gazette publication archive than just law texts and changes to administrative units, the items I usually cover in here as well as make up most of the coding project.

Subdistrict area changes/clarifications

Together with the two municipal announcements there were another three subdistrict area change announcements published in the Royal Gazette last Friday. As I had no time to check them in detail whether these actually mean any significant area changes compared with the original area definitions from 1997/98, which however I have included for reference so might check it yourself by reading the lengthy boundary definition. Just too bad there is never a map included in these kinds of announcements.

The three announcements are as follows:

• Na Thanung subdistrict, Na Muen district, Nan province [Gazette] - 1997 announcement.
  
• Nong Hong and Chamai subdistricts, Thung Song district, Nakhon Si Thammarat province [Gazette] - 1998 announcement.
  
• Song Salueng subdistrict, Klaeng district, Rayong province [Gazette] - 1997 announcement.
  

New romanization list from DOPA

As a matter of coincidence, just one day after I posted on the strange wrong romanization of Thap Khlo district, I noticed that the Department of Provincial Administration had put a new file on their website containing a new list of transcriptions. The link is titled นามสงเคราะห์ส่วนราชการ ชื่ออำเภอ จังหวัด และตำแหน่งของปค.ภาษาอังกฤษ, which translates as "Glossary of official English names of Provinces, Districts and Positions in DOPA". Thus there are all the district and province names in English, confirming that Thap Khlo was spelled wrong in earlier publications, as well as the romanization guessed for the new district in Chiang Mai being Galyani Vadhana, following the late princess' English name and not the RTGS transcription scheme. As the title of the link suggests, the romanization of the district and province names are only one part of the document, the recommended translations of positions as well as structures within the provincial administration are an equally useful second part. I have already gone through my own glossary of terms to update the English names, Somewhat strange is the name of the head of a minor district, which is supposed to be "Minor Chief District Officer", which IMHO should better be "Chief Minor District Officer". Its however academic currently anyway, as there are no minor districts right now. Only missing in this list are the chumchon, which I would translate as borough. Only thing still missing is a new updated and corrected version of the subdistrict name transcriptions, which should also include the municipalities.

Municipal announcements

Yesterday another two announcement were published in the Royal Gazette which dealt with changes to municipalities.

• Cham Kho TAO, Khao Chamao district, Rayong upgraded to a subdistrict municipality (เทศบาลตำบลชำฆ้อ) [Gazette].
• Subdistrict municipality Pa Tan Nat Rua (เทศบาลตำบลป่าตันนาครัว), Mae Tha district, Lampang had its area changed [Gazette]. Since there is no corresponding announcement from a second local government unit which ceased territory, I can only suspect it is in fact an area clarification and not a real change of area. Since 2004 the municipality covers the whole subdistrict already anyway.

Bueng Kan PAO logo competition

It seems like the PAO Bueng Kan (องค์การบริหารส่วนจังหวัดบึงกาฬ) does not want to wait until the official seal of the province is finalized, and unlike most other provinces goes for a seal with an artwork differing from that of the corresponding provincial seal. I have stumbled on a news posting on the website of the Bueng Kan Provincial Office of Non-Formal and Informal Education titled ประชาสัมพันธ์ประกวดตราเครื่องหมายขององค์การบริหารส่วนจังหวัดบึงกาฬ (Announce of contest [to design] emblem of PAO Bueng Kan).

However before you rush to check out the PDF which contains the rules of the contest and start drawing sketches - I discovered this news so late that today is already the deadline to submit the proposals, so unless they got no worthy designs the logo will be known soon. The winning design will be awarded 10,000 baht (360 US$), though I have no idea of the normal prices of logo designers in Thailand.

The logo is supposed to be either round or an ellipse with a maximum diameter of 5 centimeter, the name "Bueng Kan PAO" in the border, and for the motive inside has to choose items which have a connection to the province.

Another information gained from the PDF - the Bueng Kan PAO has its (temporary) office at plot 198 in Mu 8 of Bueng Kan subdistrict, thus not in the district office like the preliminary province administration. However, I have no idea where this office location is on Google Earth, as there's no easy way to translate a Thai address into coordinates.

Wrong romanizations

I have programmed a new little function around the XML to consolidate the romanized spellings of the administrative subdivisions which simply lists all the cases where the same Thai spelling had different romanized spellings in my XML. Especially for the administrative villages where I did the romanization manually (thus most of the Muban have no English spelling in my XML) I sometimes mixed up characters or did the spacing between the words differently. Therefore most of the cases where I had different spellings were mistakes on my side and fixed already, but there was one where the Royal Institute as the official institution to supervise the romanizations and recommended spellings has to blamed.

When DOPA on behalf of the Royal Institute published a list of recommended romanizations of all the subdistricts, I had spotted quite a lot of mistakes in that list already. But as I found and processed the corresponding list of district name recommendation several years before I learned to read Thai, so far I never questioned the spellings I picked from that list. But now with the help of my new code it seems found one mistake which was kept in Royal Institutes list for decades.

The name ทับคล้อ starts with the Thai character Tho Thahan, which is romanized with a Th as it is an aspirated consonant, in contrast to e,g, the unaspirated To Tao (ต). Any English speakers should not read this romanization like an English word, it is the same sound as in Thailand, not like in Thing. Therefore, the romanization of ทับคล้อ must be Thap Khlo. But - already in the recommended district romanizations published in Royal Gazette in 1987 it has been spelled Tap Khlo, And even the current PDF file from the Royal Institute website uses the spelling Tap Khlo. However, the reason why I was able to spot the mistake now is the list of recommended subdistrict romanization. In these files the subdistrict has been correctly romanized as Thap Khlo, and I now notice that the district is spelled Thap Khlo there as well. So while there have been several other mistakes in that list, the big mistake in the district list was fixed.

As the last publication in the Royal Gazette dates from 2000, and there have been two new districts in the meantime, it might be a good time to publish an updated (and corrected) version - or maybe even better publish a second edition of the subdistrict list addressing the mistakes, and adding the municipalities which in a few cases have a name with no corresponding district or subdistrict name. A reader has sent me several further cases where the recommended subdistrict romanizations might be wrong, but to my shame I haven't yet found the time to work through that list and incorporate it into the list of mistakes I have spotted.

Another 4 new municipalities

Just few minutes after I had posted on the two latest municipalities, the Royal Gazette website was updated with new announcements including another four TAO upgrades to municipalities.

• Tha Khanun (เทศบาลตำบลท่าขนุน), Thong Phum district, Kanchanaburi. I already spotted this one with the municipal constituencies published last month. The upgrade is probably as of June 29, the day it was signed.
  
• Bang Len (เทศบาลตำบลบางเลน), Bang Yai district, Nonthaburi. The announcement explicitly states to be effective on September 30.
  
• Kamphaeng Phet (เทศบาลเมืองกำแพงเพชร), Rattanaphum district, Songkhla. Interestingly, this TAO has been upgraded directly to a town municipality, bypassing the subdistrict municipality with the same name (เทศบาลตำบลกำแพงเพชร) located within the same subdistrict around the district office. Probably effective as of July 5.
  
• Nong Samak (เทศบาลตำบลหนองซ้ำซาก), Ban Bueng district, Chonburi, effective July 31.