
Scots language Wikipedia is edited primarily by someone who doesn't know Scots - bdr
https://www.reddit.com/r/linguistics/comments/igbbh2/the_scots_language_wikipedia_is_edited_primarily/
======
renewiltord
He genuinely seems like a guy who was just trying to help. You don't get to
that scale of edits manually without wanting to help. Reminds me of the Jesus
Painting¹. Sometimes, your reach exceeds your grasp, and it's beneficial for
society to help you out in these situations. So he made a mistake, but his
user page looks like he wasn't malicious. Be kind, go and fix the articles or
RFD them.

Treating this guy like some sort of vandal isn't right. To be honest, it
doesn't look like there are very many Scots contributors, so perhaps it should
just be dumped as a project since it doesn't look like there are many Scots
readers either.

EDIT: Ah fortunately, they've been in touch with him³ and he feels awful that
he upset people². I am glad there are kind people in the world that know how
to help people be contributors.

¹
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ecce_Homo_(Mart%C3%ADnez_and_G...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ecce_Homo_\(Mart%C3%ADnez_and_Gim%C3%A9nez,_Borja\))

²
[https://www.reddit.com/r/linguistics/comments/igbbh2/the_sco...](https://www.reddit.com/r/linguistics/comments/igbbh2/the_scots_language_wikipedia_is_edited_primarily/g2u07oo/)

³
[https://twitter.com/Cobradile94/status/1298321034530246658?s...](https://twitter.com/Cobradile94/status/1298321034530246658?s=20)

~~~
throwawaygh
His first mistake, which should be treated with graciousness and care, was a
case of reach exceeding grasp.

His second and bigger mistake was continuing astride for years even after
several people expressed concern, told him he doesn't know the language, and
explained that his editing was doing real damage to perception of the
language.

It's not right to treat him like a vandal, but the second mistake is good
cause for being a little bit more forceful and public with the rebuke.

TBH it was a failure of the community to even allow the situation to get this
bad.

~~~
Snowflame
The original Reddit post somewhat overstated the nature of "several people
expressed concern." Nobody told him outright that despite what he might think,
he did not really know Scots. That one screenshot'd, anonymized conversation
was the one time something like that happened in seven years - but that could
very easily be read as a criticism of those specific translations, not of his
work as a whole. It seems as if the Reddit OP was the first person to notice
the editor's systemic incompetence and failure to understand the degree of his
lack of fluency. So... no, I don't think he ever made this "second and bigger
mistake", aside from general massive naivety. After being told explicitly now,
he's certainly ashamed and horrified at wasting so much time on his own
personal dialect of Scots.

------
throwawaygh
On the internet no one knows you're a (Scots-)illiterate teenager.

This kid apparently didn't even understand that 1:1 dictionary look-ups aren't
a form of translation, and definitely did not understand/anticipate the
immense damage he was doing. There's plenty of blame to go around, but someone
should've stepped in and stopped this before it went so far.

The striking thing is that this person became a main administrator of the
Scots wikipedia without vetting. Anonymous/Pseudonymous online
discussion/contribution is and always has been an important part of internet
culture. But I've never been part of a forum or website where the
moderators/administrators retain their anonymity. In the rare cases where they
did, there was a good reason (e.g., avoiding embarrassment or sensitive post
history), and the admins at least knew _each other 's_ real identities. Maybe
Wikipedia needs to have a "divulge your real identity at least to other
admins" policy for at least the language-level main administrators of the
wiki.

~~~
ardy42
> This kid apparently didn't even understand that 1:1 dictionary look-ups
> aren't a form of translation, and definitely did not understand/anticipate
> the immense damage he was doing. There's plenty of blame to go around, but
> someone should've stepped in and stopped this before it went so far.

This is also an illustration of the dangers of "inclusionism" (in the
Wikipedia sense
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deletionism_and_inclusionism_i...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deletionism_and_inclusionism_in_Wikipedia)).
It took at least seven years for this person to be identified, and in the
meantime they introduced a massive amount of garbage, at least in part because
resources were spread too thin for a meaningful amount of quality control to
be done in the area that they were active.

With Wikipedia's perpetually declining participation, it would make sense for
them to drop areas where their volunteers don't have the manpower or interest
to maintain.

~~~
arethuza
"immense damage he was doing"

What damage is he doing? As a Scot and someone who is rather fond of Scots
(which I grew up speaking) I'm somewhat pleasantly surprised that anyone is
sufficiently interested to have a go at creating Wikipedia entries!

~~~
fatbird
It's like he created the latin wikipedia by converting English wiki pages into
pig-latin. It massively misrepresents the language, and when you're talking
about a language like Scots that's very little used, and possibly in danger of
going extinct, this is massively polluting to it.

What he created isn't a Scots wikipedia, it's a bad parody of one that gets
words wrong and is completely ignorant of Scots grammar, while sitting in a
position of relative authority.

If you can speak Scots, can you read these as Scots? Does it genuinely seem
like it's actually written in Scots?

~~~
soneil
The reddit thread made a great example of "an aw" being used as a substitution
for "also", so I'll round that example out to illustrate.

In a nutshell, his dictionary has provided him "also"->"an aw", but it's
better translated as "and all" or "as well".

So "I had eggs for breakfast; I had toast also" works as "I had toast an aw"
(I had toast as well). But "I also had toast" does not work as "I an aw had
toast" (I as well had toast).

"I had eggs for breakfast; I as well had toast"; As a native English speaker
you'd find that perfectly intelligible, but jarring.

I'm not Scottish, but I lived there for most my childhood - so I have a
reasonable gut for what just feels wrong. And many the examples I've seen so
far, look like spam that's been wrung through a thesaurus. The meaning's there
but it doesn't make it correct.

------
frou_dh
Apparently the following is the response from the editor. It sounds nice and
mature actually. Hopefully this event has snapped them out of the delusion
they've been afflicted with.

> Honestly, I don't mind if you revert all of my edits, delete my articles,
> and ban me from the wiki for good. I've already found out that my
> "contributions" have angered countless people, and to me that's all the
> devastation I can be given, after years of my thinking I was doing good (and
> yes, obsessively editing). I was only a 12-year-old kid when I started, and
> sometimes when you start something young, you can't see that the habit
> you've developed is unhealthy and unhelpful as you get older. I don't care
> about defending myself, I only want to stop being harassed on my social
> medias (and to stop my other friends who have nothing to do with the wiki
> from being harassed as well). Whether peace can be achieved by scowiki being
> kept like it is or extensively reformed to wipe my influence from it makes
> no difference to me now that I know that I've done no good anyway.

------
danans
The fact that it took 7 years to reach this broad a recognition of the issue
gives you an idea of how many actual speakers of the Scots language are
reading the Scots language Wikipedia.

Or maybe they don't read it specifically because they know it's
(linguistically) fraudulent, and now we know the reason why it's that way.

~~~
ndespres
The first sentence of the linked post addresses this: "The Scots language
version of Wikipedia is legendarily bad. People embroiled in linguistic
debates about Scots often use it as evidence that Scots isn’t a language"

~~~
SilasX
But people were arguing that (i.e. treating Scots like a joke Wikipedia) long
before this whole thing. See this discussion from 2005-6:

[https://sco.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collogue:Main_Page/Archive_1#...](https://sco.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collogue:Main_Page/Archive_1#Is_this_real)?

------
arethuza
For anyone interested in Scots:

[https://dsl.ac.uk/about-scots/](https://dsl.ac.uk/about-scots/)

I have no idea whether it is a language or not but the Doric version of Scots
I used as a child ("loon") is pretty much incomprehensible to anyone not from
the immediate area - terrible punishments were inflicted on anyone unwise
enough to utter a word of Scots in school!

 _It 's a sair fecht_

Edit: An example of the terrible punishments inflicted by teachers would be a
_skelped lug_.

~~~
teh_klev
I'm from Tomintoul originally and spoke Doric as a kid. When I moved to the
central belt no-one knew what the hell I was saying and sadly the Doric was
gradually beaten out of me. That said I can still fall back into Doric mode
whenever I meet another fellow traveller from the area.

~~~
arethuza
Out of interest - did they use loons & quines in Tomintoul - I'm from
Portknockie originally.

~~~
teh_klev
Yes they do. My did still uses quine all the time. For me it kinda dropped off
of my vocabulary.

------
abeppu
> Wikipedia could have been an invaluable resource for the struggling
> language. Instead, it’s just become another source of ammunition for people
> wanting to disparage and mock it, all because of this one person and their
> bizarre fixation on Scots, which unfortunately never extended so far as
> wanting to properly learn it.

How could it have been an invaluable resource for the language? Would actual
Scots speakers have used it? Apparently they mostly don't contribute to it.
The English wikipedia page on the Scots language says it has <100k native
speakers and 1.5M L2 speakers and I'm guessing they're almost all fluent
English speakers. How successful would the Scots wikipedia have needed to be
actually used as an information resource to Scots speakers given that they can
all easily use the extremely actively maintained English wikipedia?

It's maybe unfair to make the comparison to a Walmart that sets up in town and
causes all the mom and pop shops to die off -- but when you're the "neighbor"
of a giant, how do you compete?

Maybe I don't get it b/c I don't speak a language that needs active energy to
protect. But I think it makes the most sense to focus on institutions and
organizations that already have an external, mission-driven reason to produce
content (e.g. schools, cultural institutions, governments, regional media)
rather than trying to dedicate the volunteer hours (even when competent
volunteers can be found) to try to produce an encyclopedia that few will have
strong cause to use.

(edited to correct a typo)

~~~
ploika
> Maybe I don't get it b/c I don't speak a language that needs active energy
> to protect.

I do think you're at least partially correct here, with all due respect. I
learned Irish (Gaelic) in school and still use the language a fair bit, though
I don't live anywhere near a majority Irish-speaking area and I don't need it
at work.

The Irish language is not in the greatest of health, and the need for
community-driven content and interaction is very real.

Top-down stuff like TV, radio, books etc are all well and good. They help. But
at the same time it's things like face-to-face casual conversation, amateurish
podcasts and accessible blogs and memes that make it feel more like a
reviving, living language and less like homework.

By necessity that means that you need to include and encourage people who
don't have a perfect grasp of the language. And sometimes that means that very
incorrect stuff is put out there by people who can't do any better, but that's
part of the challenge of trying to save a language from extinction.

~~~
umanwizard
Out of curiosity, what do you use Irish for? Given that (AFAIK) virtually all
Irish speakers also speak English natively, what is it useful for?

(I'm not belittling Irish, btw - I think the effort to keep it alive is super
cool and worthwhile).

~~~
ploika
You probably already suspect as much, but it's not about being useful as such,
in much the same way that most art and culture isn't particularly useful in
the practical sense.

In 1800 more people spoke Irish than spoke Dutch, Swedish, Danish or Finnish.
It adds perspective what the value is if you consider what would be lost if
another of those languages died back as comprehensively as Irish did, to be
replaced by something like English or German.

A whole world of poetry, insults and turns of phrase are opened up to me. I
can understand the meanings of place names around the country (Baltimore means
"the town of the [Downton Abbey-esque] big house"). It's a rebuttal to the
notion that the Irish are really just West English, despite their
exceptionalism.

As for how I use the language; I struggle through novels, I listen to Irish
language radio and podcasts (I don't watch much TV, though there is an Irish-
language station), I talk to my partner in Irish when we want to discuss
something private while in public, I talk to other people in Irish when the
opportunity arises.

------
NelsonMinar
Who at Wikipedia is responsible for fixing a problem of this size?

~~~
howenterprisey
The community as a whole, basically. In practice this will be whoever shows up
to the ensuing discussions at "meta wikimedia" and the scots wiki. The results
of these discussions will be implemented by the editors tasked with overseeing
every Wikipedia (and other projects, like Wiktionary) of every language, such
as
[https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Stewards](https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Stewards).

------
haunter
Interesting how easy to track down this person. They used the same username
everywhere and the first Google page shows their previous username which leads
to basically everything about that person including real name, location,
address etc. I bet some news site will doxx them and make a good story about
it.

------
gridlockd
It seems to me a little bit contradictory that modern Scots is often not
considered a language but rather a dialect, when at the same time it
supposedly is so different from English that merely translating the words with
English grammar intact does it a great injustice. As far as I can tell, the
grammatical differences are very minor:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modern_Scots#Grammar](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modern_Scots#Grammar)

Seems more like somebody is upset that no true Scotsman is the chief
contributor to Scots Wikipedia. Either the true Scotsmen must be finding that
this guy has done an adequate job, or they can blame themselves for not
correcting it.

~~~
eyeinthepyramid
Part of the problem that Scots faces is that there are actually 3 Scottish
languages: Scottish Gaelic, Scots, and Scottish English. Scottish Gaelic is
similar to Irish, Scots is a descendant of Old English, and Scottish English
is a dialect of standard British English. People often conflate Scots with
Scottish English.

