Tuesday, March 22, 2011

Bueng Kan province created

Other than previously expected, the act to create Bueng Kan province was published in the Royal Gazette today already [Gazette]. As the law text was changed to be effective the day after publication instead of a 90 day waiting period, the new province comes into existence tomorrow.

Two Thai Wikipedians already did a lot of the work with the various article on Thai provinces to incorporate the new information, the parts still lacking are updated maps and also the Amphoe articles of the new province as well as those neighboring it. And even better than already doing part of the work to update Wikipedia, the user Aristitleism even translated the text of the law into English already and posted it to Wikisource. Though this is of course not an official translation, it definitely helps a lot to get the details in the law - trying to read the draft law was very difficult with my limited Thai.

It seems like all the English news sources have ignored the topic so far, neither at the government news outlet NNT nor Bangkok Post and The Nation seem to have an article on this yet - all seem preoccupied with the date of house dissolution and therefore the date of elections.

To incorporate the new province into my XML I have to wait until the geocodes of the districts get published, I only know (well, actually expect because there's no other option) that the province will get the code 38, and therefore the Mueang Bueng Kan district the number 3801, but for the other seven districts I have to wait.

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