Comment by renewiltord | Hacker News Reader

Comment by renewiltord | Hacker News Reader

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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...

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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