Is There A Free Thai Language Web-site

[kriswillems]

There's really a lot of free information about Thai Language available on the internet. The quality of this free information is very often also really good.

There are a few problems with free web-sites:

- They are often not completely free (they have modules that you need to pay for)

- They are not 100% objective because they are being sponsored (like the the thaivisa language forum is being sponsored by Thai language schools)

- If the intellectual rights of the information on a website are owned by one person, there's no motivation for others to contribute.

- If the owner of a web-site stops building his web-site a good web-site very quickly becomes old-fashioned and out-dated and a lot of effort is lost (like www.learningthai.com).

- A lot of free information in scattered over many blogs and forums and there's no place to bring it together and structure it.

- Although there are many good free web-sites, there are also many very bad free web-sites with incorrect information. An unexperienced user might not see the difference.

It would be nice if there would be a web-site that covers many aspects about Thai language that is completely based on a GPL license (as linux and other open source software is). That means that anyone has the right to add/modify information to the website but can not ask for a financial compensation for the added information (but he/she is still the owner of the information). The only source of income of this kind of web-site should be donations. The website should not contain any advertisement.

A nice model for structuring information is a wiki. But this tool seem to have limitations. There might be other tools that are better for writing a web-site about languages.

Does anyone know a web-site about Thai Language that is based on this (GPL) model (this website might also be completely in Thai)?

Do you know other tools than a wiki to build such a website?

Would you contribute to such a web-site by writing or modifying an article?

Edited May 9, 2009 by kriswillems

[jamiesensei]

I would be very interested in helping with such an initiative. A completely for free collective effort at building a Thai language learning web site.

I am one of the core developers of Moodle which is an open source learner management system. I live in Chiang Mai and work for companies around the world. See moodle.org for more info on Moodle. Moodle is a php web application much like the software that powers this bulletin board system. With Moodle you can set up a web site with many teachers who are able to set up standard learning activities such as quizzes, discussion forums, wikis etc.

I have already started playing about with making some custom activity modules to help myself learn Thai. See my web site jamiep.org and this post here for more info.

[kriswillems]

Hi Jamie,

Your experience and work are really very impressive. I think moodle might be a good framework for setting up such a web-site. The only thing I am a bit afraid of is that it might be more complicated than most people can handle.

Does moodle contain a module for setting up a talking dictionary? Or are the other open-source projects doing this, possibly with Thai-Language support?

I am a software developer, but I develop software for electronic devices (mainly in C). I have no experience with writing php, flash, html and other web-related languages. The only web-related thing I did was setting up a CMS such a joomla (www.thaileren.com).

I can write articles or make quizzes about simple subjects, but my English and Thai are not very good, so the articles would need to be reviewed.

I think you're technically much more capable than me, but I might know a bit more about Thai language.

You probably know the web-site www.thai-language.com. It runs mainly on donations (and a little bit advertisement for Amazon). I think this is an example of the kind of web-site that is useful for a Thai language learner. But this web-site only has a few quizzes and puzzles, and it's not GPL licensed. One of its strong points is that is extremely configurable via the site control panel (font, transliteration method, embedded or non-embedded sound,...) . It looks like Glenn wrote everything himself and didn't use a CMS or framework. The interface of this web-site is very simple, but all modules are very much integrated and the dictionary module is really powerful. It think it might be difficult to reach the same level of integration using moodle or a CMS.

I feel tempted to help somebody on an existing web-site (such as thai-language.com), but the licenses on these web-sites and the fact they are completely controlled by 1 person worry me. What if something happens to Glenn ... a beautiful piece of work would on hold or lost.

Does anyone know about the rights on old Thai schoolbooks, like the Maanii readers? Can they be used on a non-commercial web-site without asking the permission of the original authors or copyright owners?