Saturday, October 17, 2020

How to Demolish a Minority Language: Let Wikipedia Handle It!

Scots was a collection of dialects, a West Germanic language spoken by around 90,000 primary speakers with 1.6 million secondary speakers spread across Scotland and Ulster county in Northern Ireland, continually confused with Scottish Gaelic. Now it's a freaking joke thanks to AmaryllisGardner, who edited about 20,000 of the 60,000 articles on Scots Wikipedia using a method of "writing the language" by mostly using existing en.Wikipedia articles, then running words through translation software or a Scots dictionary and considering his assemblages "articles" in Scots, which is mostly a spoken language. There were also others involved with this, but AmaryllisGardner took the blame in the media because he did the most "work."

Reddit is Finally Useful for Once

Near the end of August, Redditor u/Ultach posted  to the r/Scotland subreddit the post "I’ve discovered that almost every single article on the Scots version of Wikipedia is written by the same person - an American teenager who can’t speak Scots" which brutally laid out the facts: 

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, and if it was an accurate representation, they’d probably be right. It uses almost no Scots vocabulary, what little it does use is usually incorrect, and the grammar always conforms to standard English, not Scots. I’ve been broadly aware of this over the years and I’ve just chalked it up to inexperienced amateurs. But I’ve recently discovered it’s more or less all the work of one person. I happened onto a Scots Wikipedia page while googling for something and it was the usual fare - poorly spelled English with the odd Scots word thrown in haphazardly. I checked the edit history to see if anyone had ever tried to correct it, but it had only ever been edited by one person. Out of curiosity I clicked on their user page, and found that they had created and edited tens of thousands of other articles, and this on a Wiki with only 60,000 or so articles total! Every page they'd created was the same. Identical to the English version of the article but with some modified spelling here and there, and if you were really lucky maybe one Scots word thrown into the middle of it. 
.....I’ll just say that if you click on the edit history of pretty much any article on the Scots version of Wikipedia, this person will probably have created it and have been the majority of the edits, and you’ll be able to view their user page from there. They are insanely prolific. They stopped updating their milestones in 2018 but at that time they had written 20,000 articles and made 200,000 edits. That is over a third of all the content currently on the Scots Wikipedia directly attributable to them, and I expect it’d be much more than that if they had updated their milestones, as they continued to make edits and create articles between 2018 and 2020. If they had done this properly it would’ve been an incredible achievement. They’d been at this for nearly a decade, averaging about 9 articles a day. And on top of all that, they were the main administrator for the Scots language Wikipedia itself, and had been for about 7 years. All articles were written according to their standards.

The problem is that this person cannot speak Scots. I don’t mean this in a mean spirited or gatekeeping way where they’re trying their best but are making a few mistakes, I mean they don’t seem to have any knowledge of the language at all. They misuse common elements of Scots that are even regularly found in Scots English like “syne” and “an aw”, they invent words which look like phonetically written English words spoken in a Scottish accent like “knaw” (an actual Middle Scots word to be fair, thanks u/lauchteuch9) instead of “ken”, “saive” instead of “hain” and “moost” instead of “maun”, sometimes they just sometimes leave entire English phrases and sentences in the articles without even making an attempt at Scottifying them, nevermind using the appropriate Scots words. Scots words that aren’t also found in an alternate form in English are barely ever used, and never used correctly. Scots grammar is simply not used, there are only Scots words inserted at random into English sentences.

And the most important points:

This is going to sound incredibly hyperbolic and hysterical 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. Wikipedia is one of the most visited websites in the world. Potentially tens of millions of people now think that Scots is a horribly mangled rendering of English rather than being a language or dialect of its own, all because they were exposed to a mangled rendering of English being called Scots by this person and by this person alone. They wrote such a massive volume of this pretend Scots that anyone writing in genuine Scots would have their work drowned out by rubbish. Or, even worse, edited to be more in line with said rubbish. (Underlines ours. S.)

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.

Ultach also includes a screenshot of actual Scots speakers trying to get AmaryllisGardner to cease and desist in December of 2016, which he did not respond to at all. 

Then came the Gizmodo article "Alleged Teen Brony Has Filled the Scots Wikipedia With Thousands of Fake Translations" (which got the update "Confirmed Teen, No Longer Brony") and it became a short-lived social media topic. But that isn't the point of this article, it's the "why" and the aftermath. 

Explanations Not Forthcoming

AmaryllisGardner, so far as we can see, has never apologized for the damage done and Wikipedia has not drummed him out nor chastised him for creating a Wiki of utter crud.


 (post under construction.)

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