User:Jon Fernquest 2022/2022 Bio & Declaration of Purpose

မင်္ဂလာပါ, I am Jon Fernquest (journalist, historian, programmer, teacher). 

My purpose here is to make Wikipedia stronger in the areas where I have expert knowledge and have published in, the literature and history of Myanmar and of Tai peoples (e.g. Lan Na in Northern Thailand, Tai Lue people of the Golden Triangle (Southeast Asia)...) being two areas that seems to need more work.

I worked at the Bangkok Post for eleven years from 2006 to 2017, co-founding and running the online 'Learning' section with Terry Fredrickson. Before that, I taught at universities in Korea and Thailand and was a traveling computer consultant working on corporate accounting systems around the United States. I am originally from Portola Valley near Stanford University in California, but now call my home Chiang Rai, Thailand since I consider it the best place in the world to live.

I lived in Yangon, Myanmar during the 1990s and made contributions to Wikipedia on Burmese history and literature such as my favorite author Journal Kyaw Ma Ma Lay including sharing some of the best short stories on her Wikipedia page that I am happy to say are still there more than 20 years later. I found my previous user pages from decades ago: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Jonfernquest

I cannot access it, however, and thus have created this page.

Work on Burmese/Myanmar History
I can claim knowledge of the Myanmar history pages I am editing with several long published papers in peer-reviewed journals and frequently cited in Myanmar history Wikipedia articles (e.g. []). Michael Aung-Thwin (MAT) cites and uses my narratives in his 'Myanmar in the Fifteenth Century: A Tale of Two Kingdoms' and a 2018 Siam Society article on Tai history uses my narratives as a main source.

The most primary sources are usually 'chronicle narratives' since 'epigraphy' is lacking, and these are, following the tradition of Pali and Sanskrit literature, literary embellishments of history (cf the very similar Kashmiri chronicle tradition in Sanskrit: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rajatarangini).

Many, if not most, primary sources come from traditional palm-leaf manuscripts and not publicly available in edited book form or translation. For Razadarit Ayeidawpon, for instance, there is a rough translation manuscript, but you would have to go to the stacks of Chulalongkorn Library or the Siam Society to find it, which is where I found it, definitely an informal and very rough translation, but always cited in my works. For the Burmese chronicle, I have my own rough translation that I have used in the past and there is also one cited in Strong's 'Relics of the Buddha' (2004). And the manuscript of Shorto's translation of the most important Mon chronicle was handed out by a prominent scholar to other scholars with a promise not to share the original manuscript. An improved version by prominent Mon scholars was going to published about a decade ago but in the end never appeared.

In short, all the important sources that should be cited by wikipedia articles are not publicly available. A lot of this stems from western academia favoring PhD work that can be transformed into tenure-achieving monographs, while not valuing scholarly translation. This is not true in all scholarly domains however. Sanskrit and Pali studies have always prioritized close commentary on original texts.

Advances in natural language processing in AI (e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BERT_(language_model)) have made machine translation a lot more accurate and this should eventually help a lot with scholarly translations. For example, yesterday I stepped through the online copy of the Thai Razadarit epic at the Thai National Library getting a rough translation just by using the Google Translate browser plugin I already had installed. This at least allows comparison with the Burmese and Mon versions and would be an substantial start for any scholarly translation.

I will be contributing to Myanmar history pages. For starters, I will try to share the informal translation sources mentioned (at least on my Google Drive or someplace like Wikileaks) that should be the first source used and cited before widely-cited speculative work by Michael Aung-Thwin MAT (which uses these sources). There is also important work to be added such as current archival manuscript work in Thailand by a researcher focusing on Pali verions of the Razadarit epic, a historical-literary work with versions in four languages: Burmese, Mon, Thai and Pali. Here another variety of problem presents itself, namely a historical-literary work that transcends the boundaries of national borders (transregional history).

I will help with editorial comments when I see places for improvement or innaccuracies (I had editorial responsibilities at the Bangkok Post for a decade). In the process, I will always provide citations and adhere to the high Wikipedia standards. As my ethnomusicology professor at University of Hawaii used to say, Wikipedia is the best original source for info nowadays in many disciplines. One can no longer dismiss it as scholars once did. Cheers.

Preliminary Ideas
- One idea is to create a Wikimedia or Wikibook version of my translation of Maha Yazawin by U Kala (using Bitnami's dockerized version of Wikimedia that can easily be uploaded to the cloud) that can be printed out in paper book form as well. I plan to add the Burmese text on the facing page in the manner of the Clay Sanskrit Library. The main difference of this version will be that as an open content/open source project on GitHub, the translation will be able to be forked and improved.

- An online news magazine or Wikibook that provides historical background to tourists traveling in Southeast Asia. I listen to many of the Burmese history Wikipedia articles using text to speech while I bike every day and they are truly superb and are like little mini history podcasts unto themselves (a lot like the famous The History of Rome (podcast)), better than any professor in the west has come up with and they are .... drum roll... completely free and accessible to everyone in Burma. Most Myanmar-related scholarship is behind paywalls and thus only accessible to rich students in western universities, not people in Myanmar or in other Southeast Asian states. The Razadarit and Bayinnaung articles, for example, could be supplemented with some stories from the works to make a more engaging podcast or Wikibook.