Scots language Wikipedia is edited primarily by someone who doesn't know Scots | Hacker News Reader

Scots language Wikipedia is edited primarily by someone who doesn't know Scots

reddit.com

193 pointsbdr48 comments

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...

² https://www.reddit.com/r/linguistics/comments/igbbh2/the_sco...

³ https://twitter.com/Cobradile94/status/1298321034530246658?s...

There were people calling him out in 2014 for not knowing Scots. He said that he's read articles written by actual speakers, and he can't tell the difference between those articles and his, so it's the same.

Whether this is willfully malicious, or stupid to the point of maliciousness seems like splitting hairs.

> Whether this is willfully malicious, or stupid to the point of maliciousness seems like splitting hairs.

Honestly, I feel differently about those two situations, especially since it affects the outcome. It looks like the Scots speakers who engaged with him have managed to work him into a fix. Good for them.

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.

Looks like the situation is in hand now. It's a pity it needed to get to this, but I don't think it needs to go further.

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.

One can't help but wonder what kind of a person would tweet their "apology" for unintentionally defacing the entirety of Scots Wikipedia in more broken Scots. Seems... Insensitive, no?

The tweet in question isn't written by the wiki editor guy. It's by someone else (who does presumably speak Scots).

Ah, my mistake. Thanks for the correction.

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.

> 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...). 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.

A short summary to clarify the "inclusionist" term, in case people don't check your link:

> The terms reflect differing opinions on the appropriate scope of the encyclopedia and corresponding tendencies either to delete or to include a given encyclopedia article

> "Deletionists" are proponents of selective coverage and removal of articles seen as poorly defended. Deletionist viewpoints are commonly motivated by a desire that Wikipedia be focused on and cover significant topic

> "Inclusionists" are proponents of broad retention, including retention of "harmless" articles and articles otherwise deemed substandard to allow for future improvement.

An even better summary is that inclusionism and deletionism never existed as actual genuine philosophies. They began because a person early in the project who was a source of several odd ideas, and who was having arguments on the English Wikipedia's mailing list, invented "deletionism" from whole cloth, and someone else invented "inclusionism" as a joke to mock that. And then people who came along years later believed the pages on Meta to be authoritative without really researching what people actually did, or how those pages came about.

The earliest version of the "inclusionism" page even pointed out that this was just name-calling.

* https://meta.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=Inclusionism&ol...

It has nothing to do with inclusionism---we can only say about inclusionism and deletionism when there are parties to determine (and debate) what would go into the encyclopedia. Instead what we see right now is the complete lack of such parties and its consequences. This problem is, I believe, in fact prevalent for smaller language editions of pretty much every Wikimedia project; I've personally seen such an incident from the Korean Wikitionary in early 2010s.

I disagree. A strongly inclusionist position would add articles to the point where there will be many pockets of articles edited according to the POV of single individuals (or interest groups), where there aren't other "parties [interested enough] to determine (and debate) what would go into the encyclopedia."

For a crowdsourced project like Wikipedia to work, there has to be a critical density of contributions, so the different contributors will keep each other in check without coordination. Otherwise, you just get Geocities.

Most Wikipedians are not strongly incluionists nor strongly deletionists. It's a spectrum, rather wide one. My point is that this spectrum can only exist with a pool of editors and labelling the lack thereof as "(strong) inclusionism" is a misunderstanding of that spectrum.

"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!

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?

The articles I read came across more as someone trying to phonetically describe a Scottish accent rather than using what I would recognise as Scots dialect.

I don't think that approach will get you from "How are you?" to "Fit like?".

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.

There have been several articles linked on HN recently saying that Scots Gaelic (which is different from Scots), is in danger of dying out. This young man seems to have put in an enormous amount of effort into adding articles to Wikipedia. I think he should have spent some of that time in the beginning learning at least the fundamentals of Scots. If he had he might have contributed to keeping Scots from completely dying out.

>>> "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!

You're really responding to the parent comment of mine, but I'll answer anyway:

The damage he was doing was making inaccurate or ignorant contributions to a reference work, which are at best no use to anyone and at worst things that will mislead others. Merely "creating Wikipedia entries" is not necessarily a positive act. For instance, no one wants me to create entries about Scotland based on my memories of the plot of Braveheart, no matter how enthusiastically I do it. Created entries need to meet minimum standards or be brought to those standards quickly.

IIRC, Wikipedia strongly discourages blindly using machine translation because the resulting articles are so bad (to the point of sometimes having sentences that say the exact opposite of the source), and it sounds like what this guy was doing was actually worse than that.

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.

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"

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#...?

This is a terribly common problem with threatened languages. The vast, vast majority of Scots speakers also have native English. And for the vast, vast majority of topics, the English wiki article is going to be much more informative. Of course this becomes circular and self-reinforcing.

The really terrifying thought is of someone trying to preserve these languages - or in the future, studying dead languages - and finding this as the most accessible corpus. Imagine if the Rosetta Stone was merely an artists impression of dead languages.

I don't know Scots and how it is "officially" defined but when I look at the Bavarian Wikipedia https://bar.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hoamseitn (and I know this is a dialect and not a proper language, despite actual grammatical differences) I can't stand it. I'm a native speaker but the regional differences between the several parts of Bavaria and Austria just make the phonetic spelling totally weird. Different parts use completely different vocals in the same word, so I'm not even sure why this would be in the same language wikipedia.

> this is a dialect and not a proper language

This is a scientifically meaningless claim. There's no real distinction between a "dialect" and a "language".

There is an old linguistics joke:

Q: What is the difference between a language and a dialect?

A: A language is a dialect with an army and a navy.

Well ok, but you're both strengthening my point and not weakening it. I do think though that languages usually are somehow formalized and that's where you can say "it's written like this even though dialect speakers pronounce it differently", whereas the language wikipedia I quoted has some "somewhat accepted by some percentage" version of how it's pronounced which doesn't even apply to 50% of the people speaking it.

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.

For anyone interested in 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.

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.

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

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

> 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)

> 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.

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).

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

What English are you referring to? The variety [0] known as American English? Black American English? New Zealand English?

I don't speak Scots, but it looks like it has some notable differences, enough to be considered a dialect, but not enough to be considered a different language outright.

Also, the line between a "language" and a "dialect" isn't as clear cut as one might initially think, and it tends to involve politics. I recommend listening to this [2] episode of Lexicon Valley about it.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Variety_(linguistics)

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dialect

[2]: https://slate.com/podcasts/lexicon-valley/2019/08/john-mcwho...

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