Wikipedia:Manual of Style/Thailand-related articles

To write and edit Thailand-related articles, please follow these conventions. See also Wikipedia:Manual of Style for the general case.

Romanization

Wikipedia uses the romanization defined in the Thai alphabet article, itself based on the Royal Thai General System of Transcription (RTGS). Notable differences are:

1. "j" (จ) and "ch" (ฉ, ช) are distinguished
2. Aspirated consonants are denoted with an "h" (e.g. "kh" for ข, ค, ฆ, not "k")
3. Unaspirated consonants do not have an "h" (e.g. "k" for ก, not "g")
4. Long vowels are denoted by vowel doubling (e.g. "aa" for า, not "ar")

Romanization should generally follow pronunciation, not the underlying Thai characters. For example, อุบลราชธานี is Ubon Ratchathani (not Ubol Ratchathani)

Exceptions can be made for cases where a different romanization has become effectively standardized, e.g. Chatuchak Weekend Market (not Jatujak).

Tones

Tones should be used when indicating the pronunciation of a word in Thai script, not but otherwise. Use standard IPA tone diacritics as follows:

Tone reference chart

Tone	Thai name	Diacritic	Example
mid	เสียงสามัญ	none	กิน kin
low	เสียงเอก	grave (à)	เก็บ kèp
falling	เสียงโท	circumflex (â)	ข้าว khâo
high	เสียงตรี	acute (á)	นก nók
rising	เสียงจัตวา	caron (ǎ)	หิน hǐn

Thai terms

Give the romanization for any name or term written in Thai when the Thai pronunciation or name is different from the English pronunciation or name. Use the pattern:

English (Thai romanization)

Then you can use the English term in the rest of the article.

For example:

Bangkok (กรุงเทพฯ Krung Thep) …

Names

In general, use the form of a person's name that is most widely known and used by English speakers. This is what people expect to see and it is what they will search for and link to.

Thai people are usually called by first name (or nickname), and even telephone books are sorted by the first name. In article content, use the first name only when referring to a previously introduced person again, instead of the last name. When adding Thai people to categories, instead of [[Category:Thai people|Lastname, firstname]] the plain [[Category:Thai people]] should be used.

Non-reigning members of Thai royalty without a substantive title are to named by formula "First name + Additional name (if exists)", for example Tipangkorn Rasmichoti. This guideline is to be applied to both deceased and to living royal Thai persons. As no other country shares same first names with Thailand, the territorial designation "of Thailand" is unnecessary. Princely titles are not to be used in titles of articles.

Converting Thai characters to HTML numeric character references

In some web browsers (Mozilla and Internet Explorer 5 and 6) you can just type or paste Thai characters directly into Wikipedia's article editing interface, and they will be converted by your browser to numeric character references before they are uploaded. For example, in such a browser, if you type or paste ไทย into the article editing form and hit Preview, you will get back ไทย, which is what your browser actually sent for you.

This usually works, but not always. An explanation follows:

If you type or paste Thai characters into a form on a web page, most modern browsers will submit the text in the same character encoding as the original form itself.

Typically, Wikipedia's English web pages are served using the ISO 8859-1 encoding, which does not support Thai characters, hence the need for such characters to manifest in the articles as numeric character references, such as 神 and 風. Thus, when forced to submit Thai characters through an ISO-8859-1 HTML form, a modern browser, such as Mozilla or Internet Explorer 5 or 6, will typically submit the characters as numeric character references. If the form were encoded in, say, UTF-8, which does support Thai characters, the characters would be submitted using UTF-8 codes rather than numeric character references, causing the text to be misinterpreted as being ISO-8859-1 by the server, which would result in apparent gibberish.

Please note that

1. there are few standards governing the issues of encoding of HTML form submissions, therefore behavior can vary from browser to browser; and
2. in most browsers, it is possible to override the interpreted encoding of a web page, consequently causing form data submitted from that page to be in that specific encoding.

Therefore, care must be taken to ensure that the browser is correctly configured to submit HTML form data in either the same encoding as the form itself (if the browser has an encoding Auto-Detect feature, making sure it is activated should suffice), or forced to an 8-bit encoding that doesn't support Thai, such as ISO-8859-1 or ASCII.

Suffixes

Capitalize suffixes in place names. For example, Chiang Mai Province; Chao Phraya River.

However, do not capitalize suffixes in the titles of historical periods and events, such as Sukhothai kingdom, Chakri dynasty.