"Scotland is not a real country; you are an Englishman with a dress". - Keen eyed Scotsman finds Scots Wikipedia is faked by an American Teenager

[rcmaehl]

Summary

It has been discovered the Scots version of Wikipedia with over 60,000 articles is majorly false and made by an American Teenager who can't speak it.

 

Quotes

Quote

 Reddit user Ultach wrote a fairly lengthy post about an alarming discovery, that Scots Wikipedia was poorly spelled English with a few Scots words thrown in here and there. Apparently one person had created and edited roughly a third of Scots Wikipedia’s 60,000 or so articles. Ultach then posted a link to a screenshot of a redacted version of that person’s Wikipedia User page. The bio was the stuff of internet meme glory. Ultach claims that this person, by 2018, had written 20,000 articles and made 200,000 edits, possibly averaging about nine articles a day for seven years. Long story short, Ultach claims this prolific editor is an American teen who does not actually speak Scots. I managed to get in contact with another Scots Wiki admin, MJL, who is not the teen but is aware of their activities. They told me over the phone that it appeared Ultach had pulled an older version of the teen culprit’s profile page, and told me that the teen is no longer a brony. MJL also confirmed that the teen began editing Scots Wiki articles when they were 12, which would make them around 19 currently. After poking around some more on Wikipedia talk pages, it would appear that the drama has only intensified. There’s currently a vigorous debate between admins, editors, and complete randos about whether the entirety of Scots Wikipedia should be closed or edited for accuracy. “From the sheer volume of pages affected, it’d take far longer to clear up the inaccuracies present in Scots Wikipedia than it would be to simply start over,” Given the sheer number of pages edited incorrectly, it is possible that this discovery could spell the end of Scots Wikipedia forever. Whatever happens, this is a sober reminder that your teacher was right all along about why you shouldn’t cite Wikipedia as a source.

Quote

But while it is extremely funny on one level that an entire arm of the web encyclopedia comprises phony lingo, there is a potentially serious impact. "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.” That view was backed up by the chief scientist at text analytics company Luminoso, Robyn Speer, who noted that several large language detectors use Scots Wikipedia as a reference. “I believe that the cld2, cld3, and fastText language detectors all have Scots (sco) as one of the languages they claim to detect, and all of them are getting their belief about what Scots is from Wikipedia,” In other words, fake Scots language is rapidly becoming real Scots online. And all because of a prolific apparent non-Scot.

 

My thoughts

This is a fake Wikipedia. DEAR GOD. There's More. NOOOO. Looks like our teachers were right all along, you really can't trust Wikipedia as a reliable source. This will hopefully be a big learning moment for Wikipedia to not trust a single user and to mark pages with little edit history or contributions as potentially untrustworthy. Regardless, it looks like quite a few language software will need to completely relearn Scots and have some apologizing to do themselves.

 

Sources

Gizmodo (quote source)

The Register (additional qoutes)
r/Scotland Reddit

[Samfisher]

Quote

told me that the teen is no longer a brony

??? HAHAHAHAHA

[Quinnell]

This is beautiful.  I'm sorry, but it's is a masterpiece.  Apparently the dude has done over 60k articles and 200k edits over several years.  Playing the long game.

[TimeOmnivore]

8 minutes ago, Quinnell said:

Apparently the dude has done over 60k articles and 200k edits over several years

Makes me think he may have been genuinely trying to do a good thing, albeit poorly. Given that no one seems to have noticed until now, he was likely the only one putting any work into the project. That said, there's still quite a bit of harm that's potentially been done here. General public perception of the language is a notable one, but a more important issue is that Wikipedia is often used to train AI - such as auto-translators - and this could have really messed with any translations to and from Scots, which could hurt the actual language as a whole.

 

Rather than placing all of the blame on the kid (though he deserves some), I think most of the focus and blame should be on the systems Wikipedia has in place that allowed this to occur at such a massive scale.

[mr moose]

Does this mean for 7 years no one from scotland has read it?

 

[leadeater]

This is brilliant, LOL!

[Kisai]

1 hour ago, rcmaehl said:

Summary

It has been discovered the Scots version of Wikipedia with over 60,000 articles is majorly false and made by an American Teenager who can't speak it.

 

Quotes

 

My thoughts

This is a fake Wikipedia. DEAR GOD. There's More. NOOOO. Looks like our teachers were right all along, you really can't trust Wikipedia as a reliable source. This will hopefully be a big learning moment for Wikipedia to not trust a single user and to mark pages with little edit history or contributions as potentially untrustworthy. Regardless, it looks like quite a few language software will need to completely relearn Scots and have some apologizing to do themselves.

 

Sources

Gizmodo (quote source)

The Register (additional qoutes)
r/Scotland Reddit

Anyone who has passed 8th grade knows not to trust Wikipedia for the same reason you don't trust opinion articles. Primary sources first. Wikipedia at best is a third or fourth-hand source.

[Kisai]

17 minutes ago, TimeOmnivore said:

Rather than placing all of the blame on the kid (though he deserves some), I think most of the focus and blame should be on the systems Wikipedia has in place that allowed this to occur at such a massive scale.

What systems? At best Wikipedia is a collection of topic-nerds, not language ones.

[DeScruff]

Heh, this reminds me of a wikidot for an obscure game I visit at least once a year and have to correct sometimes. - Its the kinda game that really does need one.
Pages go unedited for years but then randomly all the sudden you find someone who doesn't understand 'Dice Notation' editing the values, and it becomes completely incorrect.
I remember back in like 2014 having completely redo multiple pages.

... Speaking of which time to check up on it

[thorhammerz]

2 hours ago, lexusgamer05 said:

I think it would be a good idea for Wikipedia to make it so that if you want to edit a country's wikipedia page, you need to actually be in that country, and block VPN IP's

This should be implemented, if only for the entertainment value the North Korean & Chinese pages would provide .

[WereCatf]

2 hours ago, rcmaehl said:

This is a fake Wikipedia

"Fake" would mean it was deliberately made that way, but the kid was just obsessively enthusiastic about scots and thought they were doing a good thing. The intent wasn't to cause harm, it's just....well, people tend to over-estimate their own knowledge and skills.

[Drama Lama]

9 hours ago, lexusgamer05 said:

I think it would be a good idea for Wikipedia to make it so that if you want to edit a country's wikipedia page, you need to actually be in that country, and block VPN IP's

Tell that to the people whose only possible way to use Wikipedia is a VPN

 

so not that good of an Idea

 

6 hours ago, WereCatf said:

people tend to over-estimate their own knowledge and skills.

I have proof for that 

this tech forum 

 

I know a story of a professor ( physics ) who told his students not to use Wikipedia as a source and then he changed some things in the specific Wikipedia article about the topic the students had to research 

[WereCatf]

1 minute ago, Drama Lama said:

I have proof for that 

this tech forum 

Well, if we were to be precise, literally every non-comatose (or otherwise incapacitated) human does it.

[Drama Lama]

4 minutes ago, lexusgamer05 said:

I mean don't allow people to edit if they're using a VPN

Alright Person A lives in a country where Wikipedia is blocked but wants to write an article about the country 

 

or Person B living in country B also speaks language of country C and wants to write an article about his wonderful hometown because in C there is no article about it

[mr moose]

45 minutes ago, Drama Lama said:

Alright Person A lives in a country where Wikipedia is blocked but wants to write an article about the country 

 

or Person B living in country B also speaks language of country C and wants to write an article about his wonderful hometown because in C there is no article about it

Sometimes people missing out is the consequence of insuring accurate information is maintained.    Currently I believe wikipedia IP log everyone who wants to edit an article.  Sometimes edits aren't straight away either and are at least vetted for obvious falsehoods before going live.

 

This is not to say that such a method does not also have some flaws, but as the old saying goes, you only need one bad apple to spoil the whole bunch. 

 

 

[Athan Immortal]

3 hours ago, mr moose said:

Does this mean for 7 years no one from scotland has read it?

 

I'm Scottish, I've certainly never felt the need to look up the wikipedia page for somewhere I have full knowledge of.

 

That said, I feel like I haven't been protecting my homeland now.

[Guest]

Quote

Scots is a horribly mangled rendering of English

Not going to lie I thought this as well.

[Athan Immortal]

11 minutes ago, RorzNZ said:

Not going to lie I thought this as well.

Whit ye talkin' aboot man, square go ya fuckin' rocket!

[Jet_ski]

6 hours ago, lexusgamer05 said:

I think it would be a good idea for Wikipedia to make it so that if you want to edit a country's wikipedia page, you need to actually be in that country, and block VPN IP's

What if you have to update North Korea’s page but inside the country you’re only allowed to say nice things about the government? Just one scenario out of many.

[Mark Kaine]

I mean I get that it's fun to theorize off tangents,  but you do realize every wiki page by default is "fake" right? It's by design. 

[Arika]

That is some dedication to trolling

[Bombastinator]

8 hours ago, lexusgamer05 said:

I mean don't allow people to edit if they're using a VPN

I would go farther.  I would say everything that goes in is untrustworthy by default until it gets confirmed and confirmation stuff needs to be carefully vetted and listed as “confirmed by” rather than necessarily marked trustworthy 

[Lurick]

I feel this fits well, lol

 

[Bombastinator]

9 minutes ago, Dean0919 said:

I remember in the past we had encyclopedia books if we wanted reliable source. Later, when Internet became a thing and I discovered Wikipedia, I thought it was a good replacement for those old encyclopedia books. Apparently I was wrong. So on what source can we rely on the Internet? Do we have any website that has same purpose what those old encyclopedia books had when we needed to find information about this and that?

 

I think it would be nice if Wikipedia has more strict rules for editing or writing the content to avoid fake information.

Yep.  Those same encyclopedia companies have websites.

[MarkelFe]

11 hours ago, lexusgamer05 said:

I think it would be a good idea for Wikipedia to make it so that if you want to edit a country's wikipedia page, you need to actually be in that country, and block VPN IP's

So as a Spaniard I can edit the English Wikipedia? Doesn't seem fair