I’ll keep it short today, but I did want to point out one interesting article I read yesterday. But warning – it’s a bit nerdy!
Shock an aw: US teenager wrote huge slice of Scots Wikipedia from theguardian.com. Apparently a 19 year old US teenager is responsible for over half of the edits on the Scottish Wikipedia. He started when he was 12. The problem? He doesn’t speak Scots. And he created over 20,000 pages (as of 2018), which is about a third of the Scots Wikipedia. Most of the pages and edits were English with some words spelled “phonetically” in what can only be described as a cliche of Scots.
And how did it get this far? From what I’ve read his time on Wikipedia plays a bit part – the longer you are on Wikipedia the more seniority you are granted, so he received administrator rights some years ago. He was then able to undo edits people had made to try and correct his work.
It’s a crazy story, but the good news is this will probably (with a lot of work and effort) cause a great clean-up of the Scots Wikipedia. Unless they nuke it entirely and start over, which is one of the proposed actions over on the talk page (!). I actually attended a Dutch Wikidata convention in the past in Amsterdam (Wikidata being the ‘data’ side of Wikipedia) and I was quite impressed with some of the scripts and tools people made over the convention weekend. I do think they can get through this – and I do hope the user in question does keep editing as it can be a useful hobby. But perhaps he should stick to English Wikipedia until he learns the Scots language…
Life in the Hague 