Culture

Someone Finally Caught The US Teen Who Edited 20,000 Wikipedia Articles With A Scottish Accent

"Telekinesis es a form of movnig ebjocts with yor maind"

by Michelle Rennex  27 August 2020
scots wikipedia

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If you’ve never heard of Scots, you’ve likely not experienced the joy that is Scottish Twitter.

Scots for those unfamiliar is an indigenous West Germanic language of Scotland that is often confused with Scottish “slang”. The language itself infuses standard English with different words, phrases and grammar particular to the Scots dialect.

Common words you’ve probably come across include: “ae” in place of “of”, “aboot” instead of “about” and “wean” to describe a child.

To the average ear, Scots can often just sound like standard English, simply said with a Scottish accent instead of its own separate language.

And this is the problem that a 12-year-old teen from the US faced when he decided to edit tens of thousands of Scots Wikipedia pages without, well, the ability to speak, read or write Scots at all.

Since 2013, the teen impressively managed to produce over 20,000 pieces of content, which is a whopping 49% of all Scots Wikipedia articles, according to a site administrator.

Now 19, and only known by his Wiki username, AmaryllisGardner was caught out when someone uncovered his Scots Wikipedia editing spree and posted it to Reddit yesterday.

“The Scots language version of Wikipedia is legendarily bad,” Redditor Ultach wrote in a fairly long post. “It uses almost no Scots vocabulary, what little it does use is usually incorrect, and the grammar always conforms to standard English, not Scots.”

After searching for something on Scots Wiki, Ultach noticed that the edit history of the page had only been done by the one account. Then clicking on AmaryllisGardner’s page, Ultach realised that the teen had also “created and edited tens of thousands of other articles”.

“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,” Ultach continued in his post. “They are insanely prolific. They’d been at this for nearly a decade, averaging about nine articles a day.”

“The problem is that this person cannot speak Scots… they don’t seem to have any knowledge of the language at all.”

While in theory, this all sounds like a whole lot of nothing, the reality is that it’s all very funny.

Instead of actually using Scots as a language, Ultach noted that the Wikipedia entries seem as though the articles have simply been re-written in English, while using the Online Scots Dictionary to replace words where possible.

One example can be seen on the Scots Wikipedia page for telekinesis, where the teen wrote: “Telekinesis es a form of movnig ebjocts with yor maind”, which is very clearly just a Scottish accent written out.

Since the revelation of the teen mastermind’s power over Wikipedia, articles on the site have begun to be edited to reflect the actual language. For example, the entry for telekinesis has since been updated to read: “Telekinesis is a ledged psychic docht allouin a body tae promuive a pheesical seestem wi’oot titchin hit.”

At the end of Ultach’s Reddit post, they claim that “this person has possibly done more damage to the Scots language than anyone else in history” and the teen “engaged in cultural vandalism on a hitherto unprecedented scale”.

This sentiment was shared by a number of Scottish people, who agreed that the teen’s poor attempt at translation further reinforced the idea that Scots is just “a horribly mangled rendering of English, rather than being a language or dialect of its own”.

As a result, AmaryllisGardner begun to receive harassment over his Wikipedia edits and took Wikipedia to apologise for his misguided actions despite thinking he was “doing good”

“Honestly, I don’t mind if you revert all of my edits, delete my articles, and ban be from the Wiki for good,” he wrote. “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.”

While clearly apologetic and unaware of the impact of his edits, you do have to admit the sheer ridiculousness of this all is pretty damn funny.

To address the issue on the site, Scots Wikipedia has also since issued a statement above their articles, which reads: “Following recent revelations, Scots Wikipedia is currently reviewing its articles for large scale language inaccuracies”.

And for those who’d like to know the Scots language version of that sentence, the site is “presently reviewin its airticles for muckle leid inaccuracies.”