
Teen Has Filled the Scots Wikipedia with Thousands of Fake Translations - sanqui
https://gizmodo.com/alleged-teen-brony-has-filled-the-scots-wiki-with-thous-1844845086
======
pixelbath
This was posted by another HN reader to the other thread, but I feel it's more
relevant on this more sensationalist article.

>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.

I can imagine it's quite a punch to the gut to find out an activity you were
doing for _years_ was literally the wrong thing, and major news outlets are
piling on.

~~~
daveslash
Agreed, thank you for posting. I'd also like to add: I wish this article had
been title had used the word " _Incorrect_ " instead of "Fake". I generally
attribute things called "Fake" as having had some sort of intentional
incorrectness. "Fake" doesn't always imply _malicious_ intent (think "fake
houses" for nuclear testing), but it does imply knowing intent.

This kid was well intentioned, tried his best, and got it wrong. To me, that's
_" incorrect"_, not _" fake". _

[Edit: Spelling]

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majewsky
Previous discussion (39 comments):
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24273851](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24273851)

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im3w1l
If the teen behind it was well meaning, then teaching him proper Scots might
be worthwhile.

~~~
LandR
> proper Scots

I don't think there is such a thing?

Scottish people speak English, some use more slang than others, but it's
English.

This Scottish wikipedia reads like utter nonsense.

~~~
ska
Tosh, as they say. Scots speak multiple languages and multiple dialects. The
Scots language you incorrectly dismiss comes from a linguistic divergence in
the 1500s, and has distinct regional dialects (e.g. Doric, with many Danish
loan words etc.) Which is separate from Scots Gaelic....

~~~
senorsmile
Correct. Scottish English is a dialect of english, while the Scots Language is
a germanic language that is different enough to have low mutual
intelligibility (which means it's a different language and not a dialect...
although this distinction doesn't have really clear criteria in Linguistics
currently).

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sp332
The user is
[https://sco.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uiser:AmaryllisGardener](https://sco.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uiser:AmaryllisGardener)
Since the edits are public I'm not going to consider this doxxing. I'm not
going to link any other identities to the username.

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mmhsieh
oot the hoose w'him!

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rbanffy
This is absolutely hilarious.

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LandR
I tried to read this page
[https://sco.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Burns](https://sco.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Burns),
and really struggled. Is it just meant to be regular wikipedia pages but
written in some awful slang?

~~~
detaro
Why do you expect to be able to read a page in a language/dialect you
apparently don't speak? And then take that as a sign that it's not a real
thing?!

~~~
LandR
Well, I'm Scottish, I've been Scottish all my life! Lived in Scotland all my
life.. That page is mostly nonsense.

~~~
detaro
And I'm German and lived here most my life, that doesn't magically mean I
speak all the dialects/languages that exist here.

~~~
soneil
Scots is usually fairly intelligible, at least to the Scottish.

Essentially, Scots branches off from middle english in a slightly different
direction. But vernacular Scottish - the language you'd expect to hear day to
day on the streets - is modern English with borrowings (both in content and
grammar) from Scots. And the scale of these borrowings goes a long way to
define how "thick" we perceive the various accents as.

So this leaves Scots with a few interesting traits. It can be easily mistaken
for "just slang", because huge amounts of Scottish slang are near-direct
borrowings. And this goes both ways, where the more slang you've been exposed
to, the more you can pick out in Scots without actually knowing it. This
leaves it being nowhere near as "foreign" as Gaelic, for example.

(It also helps that Robert Burns was dragged out annually at school, leaving
Scots as least as recognisable as Shakespearean English.)

I'm not arguing that the Scottish "just know" Scots by default, or even that
half of those who claim to know it, actually do. But there is a lot more
exposure to it, or at least parts of it, than many people realise. It does
turn out to be surprisingly recognisable (although I will admit, very jarring
to see it written).

