What is "panyathai"

Panyathai is a Thai online encyclopedia started on 1 December 2006 with 80 articles, mainly in Thai. Established in honor of King Bhumibol Adulyadej, the site plan is to have at least 80,000 articles by 5 December 2007, the king's 80th birthday. There is some English content, mostly providing information about the Royal Projects.

The articles come from two different sources:

1. Current articles written by experts.
2. New articles to be written by volunteers.

All the content will be copyrighted, unlike the other Web-based encyclopedias. The project claims itself as a wiki and states that users can make changes to the articles but there is no such functionality since its launch. The website allows creation of articles and adding comments to the already-created articles. However, registration is required. The website uses Drupal as the content management system and MediaWiki for the Wiki part.

The project is controlled by the Thai Webmaster Association with support from the Ministry of Education and the Thai Health Promotion Foundation.