User:Jonfernquest

Observation
Laughing at Wikipedia is like laughing at a poor village without a library. (Hardly a very noble thing to do)

Defending the ideal of Wikipedia
The Benefits of Wikipedia, User:Ta bu shi da yu/Global Politician is a nice rebuttal to an attack on Wikipedia

Noteworthy
Wikipedia:Wikiproject Academics provides nice guidelines and templates for tracing intellectual influence among academics, CSV converter from Help:Table is the quickest way to convert from Excel to Wikipedia tables, exported Excel to a CSV file as an intermediate step (CSV = comma separated value), Catalogue of CSS classes,  User:Raul654/Raul%27s laws, User:CesarB is a model of orderliness, using multiple user pages, User:Mel Etitis has a very visually pleasing table for organising his contributions, logical fallacies, cognitive distortion, Category:Logical fallacies, African philosophy, History of Tibet is a model for History of Myanmar, Cossack

New Pages
Baña Thau (Mon Queen) redirected as Shin Sawbu and Queen Baña Thau, Luchuan-Pingmian Campaigns, Category:Tai History, SOAS Bulletin of Burma Research linked to from Burma studies linked to from Area studies, Thai studies, Carniero's Circumscription Theory. Cinema of Myanmar, Ma Ma Lei, List of Mon monarchs, Si Ke Fa, Mong Mao, Ming Shi-lu, Bai Yi Zhuan, Shi Mian Lu, User:JonFernquest:Gerschenkronian collective dilemmas, User:JonFernquest:Agricultural Succession in Southeast Asia, User:JonFernquest:Tai History, Mandala (Southeast Asian history)

Pages Created
Tabinshwehti, Rajadhirat, Bayinnaung, Ludu U Hla, Mingyinyo, Theippan Maung Wa, Mawbi Hsaya Thein, Thein Pei Myint

Pages Planned
King Dhammazedi (Mon), Tai Lu History, Burmese Chronicle, List of Mon rulers, Historians of Burma: Gordon Luce, Victor Lieberman, D.G.E. Hall, Shorto

Pages with Additions
History of Myanmar, Literature of Myanmar, U Nu, Mon people, Bangkok Post, Ming Dynasty military conquests, History of Laos to 1945, Setthathirath, Area studies, Ahom, Mae Fah Luang University

Biographical Information
Where do I live? I currently live in Bangkok and Chiang Rai in Thailand.

How many languages do you speak? I speak English, but I also speak Thai due to my living and working in Thailand at Mae Fah Luang University in Chiang Rai and the Bangkok Post newspaper. My family members are Tai Lu. I also speak and read Burmese due to the fact that I lived in Yangon, Burma and Maesai for many years. Recently, I've been struggling with Classical Chinese so I can read Ming sources for Tai history.

How many dogs do you have? Shih Tzus: Nong Fah, Buk Bui, Nong Fang, Kuk Kik, Nong Som, Ping Pong, Mooky, and two more I haven't even seen yet. They have a blog and a photo album

For current biographical information see my biographical page at the Bangkok Post Education website.

Areas of Expertise
I currently work at the Bangkok Post newspaper in Bangkok in the education department. I make extensive use of Wikipedia references everyday in the English language reading lessons using business news.

Educated in economics, I have taught econometrics, macroeconomics, microeconomics, and economic history at the university level. I used articles from Wikipedia on the gold standard and the industrial revolution as well as other topics to supplement an economic history course I taught in rural Chiang Rai, Thailand at Mae Fah Luang University recently. Wikipedia can be of great use in rural areas because libraries in rural areas usually do not have many books.

I worked seven years as a computer consultant customizing business systems like accounting and payroll for large corporations. I have spent a lot of time programming in Perl, Python, and most recently PHP. I like these so-called scripting languages because I am not a full-time programmer now and the programs I write now need to be short, quick, and solve a specific small problem.

Wikipedia Issues: To Do
1. Convert Excel list of Mon rulers with reign dates, succession (father-to-son, brother-to-brother, etc), mode of death, names in Mon, Pali, and Burmese, to Wikipedia table format.

2. Multiple names for monarchs is an issue for many of the ethnic minority monarchies of Myanmar as well other Former monarchies of Asia. Which name should be used when referring to the monarch? Is there is a respectful short name that can be used in general contexts to save space and not interrupt with the flow of narrative when referring to the monarch, because the Pali name is often very long, e.g. Rama I of Thailand. The territory once controlled by the Mons and other ethnic minorities in Burma like the Shans has long been controlled by a Burmese state which has Burmese names to refer to these monarchs, but the Mon and Shan names that were used to refer to them in the states they ruled over in the past time should be used when writing history, or at least this is what I've been taught. Jonfernquest 16:52, 1 August 2006 (UTC)

Wikipedia Issues: Done
1. Transcription of Burmese Names: One example of the problem is that the Encyclopedia Britannica uses "Minkyinyo" whereas the foremost scholar on the subject professor Lieberman at University of Michigan and the late U Than Tun uses "Mingyinyo". I've followed their lead in the papers I've published.

There should probably be a Redirect from "Mingyinyo" to a "Minkyinyo" entry. This is an issue with the names of many historical personages in Burma since spellings vary by author. For example, Aung-Thwin's "Dhammazedi" versus Charney's "Dhammacetti". When the Burmese language gets added to the unicode engine we can easily add the name in Burmese alphabet which should be how it is done anyway.

Special Wikipedia Interests
I am especially interested in Wikipedia citation databases and their application to writing objective history.

Wikipedia's technology and guiding philosophy provides a good model for writing objective history.

First, Wikipedia's guiding concept of Neutral Point of View (NPOV) forces people to sort out the basic facts before launching into personal interpretation.

Second, Wikipedia's technology has the potential to allow historians to write layered histories that separate source from historical interpretation. Several projects at Wikipedia have great potential to facilitate this kind of history, such as the proposal for citation databases Wikicite and WikiTextRose and their use in historiography and the writing of history.

Third, Wikipedia's Web 2.0 collaborative features allow collaboration and peer review between historians working on the same historical data and period. The writing of egoless and objective history becomes a possibility with Wikipedia.

Ultimately, what Wikipedia's software could facilitate is a sort of computational historiography allowing the reader to move seemlessly from original primary sources through successive layers of interpretation, making historical arguments and interpretations clearer and more explicit, thereby giving the historian's art more transparency.

As a writer and reader of historical works, I often find it difficult to disentangle source from interpretation in historical writing. Furthermore, historians often get their careers and egos tangled up in very personal interpretations. Wikipedia to the rescue!

As a writing teacher for many years in Asia, I am also interested in quick and easy citation systems that I can insist that students use habitually like Harvard referencing that make it easy for students to cite sources, acknowledge sources, and most importantly, avoid plagiarism.

Early modern Burmese history (c. 1350-1600): Best sources for Wikipedia articles
I have studied Burmese historical sources for the early modern period (c. 1350-1600) for over ten years and have published three papers at School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) University of London on this topic in the SOAS Bulletin of Burma Research. I have extensive knowledge of the sources and aim to thoroughly support everything I write in Wikipedia with citations. I have a weblog Burma - Yunnan - Bay of Bengal (c. 1350-1600) which I try to make informative and critical as well as posting new web links and original translations and historical writing.

To stay within Wikipedia's no original research policy and avoid synthesis of published material serving to advance a position it seems that citing a small number of reliable sources when writing articles is the best strategy, at least to begin with, otherwise you're going to end up adding your own interpretive glue to hold the disparate sources together.

There are probably three principal sources that should be cited whereever possible for early modern Burmese history (c. 1350-1600): Phayre's History of Burma (1883), which is usually translated almost directly out of the Burmese chronicle, and which almost reads like Wikipedia articles already. Some modernization of names is necessary though. Harvey's history of Burma (1925) takes a lot of its history directly from Burmese, Mon, and Chinese primary sources. The Burmese chronicle itself is the most important, either in the Hmannan or U Kala Mahayazawingyi version, both of which are only available in the Burmese language. Harvey and Phayre should of course be amended with more recent research whereever possible, but they follow the original Burmese chronicle fairly closely, the most important source for early modern history, and the Burmese chronicle has yet to be translated into, or even adequately summarized in English, except for Luce's Pagan period translation "The Glass Palace Chronicle".

Projects
WikiProject China, joined the participants:


 * 1) - Tai in Ming Yunnan (c. 1350-1600) using Southeast Asia in the Ming Shi-lu.