This article was originally posted on WomenLearnThai.com.
Over at FCLT Jeff Mcneill shared his proposal for a Thai Language Stack Exchange. And as I was unaware of the resource I had to Google.
About: Launched in 2010, the Stack Exchange network consists of 133 Q&A communities including Stack Overflow, the largest, most trusted online community for developers to learn, share their knowledge, and build their careers. Since then, the Stack Exchange network has grown into a top 50 online destination with Stack Overflow alone serving more than 50 million developers every month.
When I asked Jeff the reasoning behind this particular project, he came back with four:
- The impetus for the idea was a Stack Exchange question regarding the Thai script and its possible relation to Sanskrit. I think this was in the Linguistics stack. I browsed around for the Thai language stack… and it didn’t exist!
- Also, very high quality resources such as thai-language.com have a forum but they are not used much.
- Third is that while it seems everyone is on Facebook and there is good discussion, search and indexing of conversations is very poor. It’s fine for keeping up with recent activity, but older topics that might be relevant on into the future are hard to find.
- Stack Exchange isn’t perfect but it has been very helpful to me on a number of topics, and doesn’t require an account to read, unlike Quora.
So, just how does this work?
The goal is to come up with at least 40 questions that embody the topic’s scope. When at least 40 questions have a score of at least ten net votes (up minus down), then the proposal is considered “defined.”
And to do just that, first do a quick walk through the Stack Exchange Tour, then go to Area51: Thai Language Stack Exchange.
That’s a great idea!
A Thai Language Stack Exchange would certainly solve a lot of problems we keep running into at FB especially.
Sounds very interesting !
This is a great idea. There are lots of good places to ask questions about the popular European languages, but very few Thai equivalents. If this could become the de facto place to go to ask questions about Thai, that would be great.
I think one of the reasons that the thai-dictionary.com forum is quiet is that it is closed to new members, at least it was when I tried to sign-up a few months ago. Regardless of that, I think Stack Exchange is a better place to host the discussion. It’s well-known and independent.