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

193 点作者 bdr超过 4 年前

9 条评论

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 <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ecce_Homo_(Mart%C3%ADnez_and_Gim%C3%A9nez,_Borja)" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ecce_Homo_(Mart%C3%ADnez_and_G...</a>² <a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/linguistics/comments/igbbh2/the_scots_language_wikipedia_is_edited_primarily/g2u07oo/" rel="nofollow">https://www.reddit.com/r/linguistics/comments/igbbh2/the_sco...</a>³ <a href="https://twitter.com/Cobradile94/status/1298321034530246658?s=20" rel="nofollow">https://twitter.com/Cobradile94/status/1298321034530246658?s...</a>

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throwawaygh超过 4 年前

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.

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danans超过 4 年前

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.

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frou_dh超过 4 年前

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.

arethuza超过 4 年前

For anyone interested in Scots:<a href="https://dsl.ac.uk/about-scots/" rel="nofollow">https://dsl.ac.uk/about-scots/</a>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 fechtEdit: An example of the terrible punishments inflicted by teachers would be a skelped lug.

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abeppu超过 4 年前

> 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)

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haunter超过 4 年前

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.

NelsonMinar超过 4 年前

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

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gridlockd超过 4 年前

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:<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modern_Scots#Grammar" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modern_Scots#Grammar</a>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.