Shock an aw: US teenager wrote slice of Scots Wikipedia
Shock an aw: US teenager wrote huge slice of Scots Wikipedia
The Scots Wikipedia entry on the Canada goose – or “Canadae guiss” – was at first honest about its provenance. A tag warned: “The ‘Scots’ that wis uised in this airticle wis written bi a body that’s mither tongue isna Scots. Please impruive this airticle gin ye can.”But, as the author grew in confidence, so he removed the caveat, and continued on his Scots-writing spree.Now an American teenager – who does not speak Scots, the language of Robert Burns – has been revealed as responsible for almost half of the entries on the Scots language version of Wikipedia.In the middle ages, Scots was one of the great literary languages of the British Isles. But 18th-century intellectuals, including David Hume, sought to remove “Scotticisms” from their writing and speech. It has enjoyed growing momentum in recent years, and one of the forums designed to promote it is Scots Wikipedia, the largest open-access corpus of the Scots language in the world.The revelation about the teenage contributor was made on Reddit by a user called Ultach who pointed out that Scots Wikipedia was notorious for its poor linguistic quality.The entries in question do little more than substitute occasional, and often wrongly spelled, Scots words into English grammatical constructions. As a result, the project often inadvertently ends up being used to bolster arguments that Scots is not a language in its own right.“This is going to sound incredibly hyperbolic and hysterical,” wrote Ultach, “but I think this person has possibly done more damage to the Scots language than anyone else in history. They engaged in cultural vandalism on a hitherto unprecedented scale.”The 19-year-old North Carolinian, who edits under the username AmaryllisGardner, responded on Wikipedia saying that he was “devastated” at the reaction “after years of my thinking I was doing good”.He wrote: “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.” He also called for other users to stop harassing him and his friends on social media.According to Wikipedian MJL, another administrator on the site, AmaryllisGardner had created or edited 49% of all the articles on the Scots Wikipedia. “Speaking as an admin there, here’s what happened with Scots Wikipedia,” they tweeted after the story broke on Reddit. “Nobody cared about maintaining it. Someone stepped up because no one else did. That person was never given any guidance. Articles ended up being very poorly mistranslated.”AmaryllisGardner’s edits showed a lack of understanding of the basics of the language: in one common error, he used “an aw” as a dictionary translation of the English word “also” when grammatically the phrase should be used more like “and all”. “I’m X, and I’m also Y,” can be translated as: “A’m X, an A’m Y an aw,” for instance. When the error was flagged in January this year, after seven years of editing the Scots Wikipedia, AmaryllisGardner said he had “never thought about that”.In Wikipedia’s sometimes insular community, seniority matters a great deal. Purely by being an early, and prolific, editor of the Scots Wikipedia, AmaryllisGardener gained administrator rights, and the power to undo vandalism of the site, occasionally using that to overrule others who tried to fix his errors.The revelation has led to some calling for the entire Scots Wikipedia to be deleted, arguing that its continued existence causes more harm than good. “It’s been suggested to me to nuke the whole thing and start over,” MJL said. Another proposal gaining support among Wikipedia’s broader community calls for every edit the user has made in the last seven years to be undone, even if that means deleting almost half of the encyclopaedia.But Michael Dempster, the director of the Scots Language Centre based in Perth, takes a more ameliorative approach and says he is now in conversation with the Wikimedia Foundation about the prospect of properly re-editing the teenager’s contributions.“We know that this kid has put in an incredible amount of work, and he has created an editable infrastructure. It’s a great resource but it needs people who are literate in Scots to edit it now. It has the potential to be a great online focus for the language in the future.”Dempster, a first-language Scots speaker himself, says that he is assessing how to put together a team of volunteers to undertake a mammoth re-editing task.To that end, he has already made available free online his own introductory course to Scots language learning. “Hopefully people who want to help can watch these videos first,” he said. “There is a concern that more people will join in now and make the same mistakes.”Daria Cybulska, the director of programmes and evaluation at Wikimedia UK, said: “We do not own or control the Scots-language Wikipedia, which as with all parts of the Wiki community is edited and managed by volunteers.“We are aware of the concerns that have emerged about the content of the Scots-language Wikipedia and are in touch with the Wikimedia Foundation and volunteer editor community to offer support in helping to ensure that these issues are addressed.“We are exploring ways of supporting the existing Scots Wikipedia editor community, by offering help with editing training for newcomers, facilitating partnerships with authoritative language organisations and organising editing events to harness current interest and energy.”The Guardian has reported on the growing momentum behind Scots in recent years, as younger people in particular shrug off the “cultural cringe” associated with speaking indigenous languages. It has been bolstered by the official recognition of the Scots language by the Scottish government as well as younger writers such as Chris McQueer consciously working in Scots.