Community Bulletin

Scots Wikipedia Let Anyone Write the Encyclopedia and Relied on the Community to Check It. For Seven Years the Most Prolific Member of the Community Was an American Teenager Who Did Not Speak Scots.

On 25 August 2020 a Reddit user called Ultach posted to the r/Scotland forum under the title "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". Scots is the language of Robert Burns, recognised by the Scottish government and distinct from Scottish Gaelic. The Guardian described its Wikipedia edition as "the largest open-access corpus of the Scots language in the world." Ultach had checked the edit history of a few articles, kept going, and arrived at a conclusion he introduced with some care: "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."

The post collected 18,700 upvotes, according to Slate. Within two days the story was in Gizmodo, Vice's Motherboard, the i, Quartz and the Guardian, which headlined it "Shock an aw." The editor in question, username AmaryllisGardener, was a 19-year-old from North Carolina. He had started editing Scots Wikipedia in 2013, at the age of 12. By Motherboard's count he had written well over 23,000 articles and made well over 200,000 edits. MJL, the other active administrator, said he had created or edited 49% of all the articles on a wiki that held nearly 58,000.

The Method

Ultach's diagnosis was simple. "The problem is that this person cannot speak Scots," he wrote. "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." The technique, as he reconstructed it, was to write an article in English, "then look up each word individually using the Online Scots Dictionary," replace each English word "with the first result, and if they couldn't find a word, they just let it be."

The results kept English grammar and changed the spelling. The editor's first article, on the Human Development Index, called it "a composite statistic o life expectancy, eddication, an income indices tae rank kintras intae fower tiers o human development." The i found the page on Blaise Pascal stating that "Pascal an aw wrote in defence o the scienteefic method," using "an aw," which means roughly "as well" and goes at the end of a sentence, as a straight swap for "also." Professor Robert McColl Millar, chair in linguistics and Scottish language at the University of Aberdeen, told the i the material was "very odd indeed" and showed "a very limited knowledge both of Modern Scots and its earlier manifestations."

Some of the early articles had been honest about it. The entry on the Canada goose, or "Canadae guiss," originally carried a tag warning that its Scots had been written by someone whose mother tongue was not Scots, and asking readers to improve it. As the author grew in confidence, the Guardian reported, he removed the caveat. On his user page he rated his own Scots at 2 out of 5, and later 3.

The Checkers

Wikipedia's model is that anyone can write and enough people will read closely to catch what is wrong. On Scots Wikipedia the second half of that arrangement had mostly left. MJL told Gizmodo that the wiki had been started in 2004 by native Scots speakers who had since left, and that at most 10 to 20 admins and editors were active. The Wikipedia Signpost, the community's own newsletter, put it more bluntly: "To the extent there ever was an authentic Scots-speaking Scots Wikipedia community, it had departed by 2012." The 12-year-old arrived in 2013.

Purely by being early and prolific, he was made an administrator. Complaints did arrive, in small numbers. In 2016 a user wrote on his talk page that the content "barely resembles the actual Scots language" and that "The language you use here is English with some changes in spelling and passing it off as the real deal harms the already derogatory view of Scots languages." In January 2020, seven years in, someone pointed out the problem with "an aw." He replied, the Guardian reported, that he had "never thought about that." The Signpost's verdict: "there simply wasn't anyone to notice."

MJL, who was not a native Scots speaker either, summarised it on Twitter: "Nobody cared about maintaining it. Someone stepped up because no one else did. That person was never given any guidance." The Wikimedia Foundation told Gizmodo and Business Insider that it "does not set editorial policy on Wikipedia or our other projects, meaning we do not write, edit, or determine what content is included on a specific language Wikipedia or how that content is maintained." Daria Cybulska of Wikimedia UK told the Guardian: "We do not own or control the Scots-language Wikipedia, which as with all parts of the Wiki community is edited and managed by volunteers." No organisation had ever owned the checking either.

The Training Data

An encyclopedia nobody reads closely is a minor embarrassment. One that machines read is a different problem. Quartz pointed out that many of the language models behind spell checkers, translation tools and voice assistants are trained on Wikipedia, and that for a low-resource language like Scots, with few other digital archives of text, "some models base their entire understanding of the language on the phony version written in the Scots Wikipedia." David Yarowsky, a computer science professor at Johns Hopkins, told Quartz: "I don't think people necessarily realize how important Wikipedia is for training all of our language technologies." The Signpost concluded that the episode had "likely poisoned training data sets for the Scots language used by translation algorithms." Nobody published a list of which systems had eaten it.

The same corpus had a human audience too. Ultach wrote that people arguing about whether Scots was a language at all often used the wiki as evidence that it was not, "and if it was an accurate representation, they'd probably be right." Millar told the i: "We all have hobbies; it's good someone has an interest in Scots. But they might have written in Klingon or Dothraki if they enjoy translating into a 'fringe' language."

The Apology

AmaryllisGardener responded on Wikipedia the same day. "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)." He added: "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." To Slate he later explained that Scots had seemed a good fit because its "bare content was mutually intelligible to English," and accounted for the edit count as "naïve passion and (clinically diagnosed) OCD."

The Cleanup

A request for comment on Meta-Wiki, opened on 25 August, offered options running from "Nuke and start over" to mass rollback to paying linguists as auditors, the last rejected because Wikipedia is supposed to be run by volunteers. MJL warned that a closed Scots Wikipedia "will never be reopened." A banner went up across the site: "Followin recent revelations, Scots Wikipedia is presently reviewin its airticles for muckle leid inaccuracies." The editor James Salsman ran the wiki against a Scottish government word list and flagged about 1,000 articles containing English words with no business in Scots; the entry on Rafael Nadal had 93.

Michael Dempster, director of the Scots Language Centre in Perth and a first-language speaker, opted for repair over demolition. "We know that this kid has put in an incredible amount of work, and he has created an editable infrastructure," he told the Guardian. "It's a great resource but it needs people who are literate in Scots to edit it now." He posted his introductory Scots course online, noting "a concern that more people will join in now and make the same mistakes." The editathon that followed produced about 3,000 edits from about 30 attendees, Slate reported, against 18,700 upvotes. In September 2021 the Scots Language Centre launched Scots Warks, a government-funded website for adult literacy in Scots that it said grew out of "the stoushie anent Wikipedia back in 2020." The Meta-Wiki discussion stayed open until 18 May 2024, when it was given a procedural close on the grounds that "Action (of a sort) was taken years ago."

Scots Wikipedia was founded by native speakers, abandoned by them, and kept running for seven years by a child with a dictionary, who was promoted to administrator for his diligence. The system worked exactly as designed: one person wrote and everyone else was free to check. In 2016 one person did, and wrote on the talk page in English.

Filed from public reporting:

Scots Wikipedia Let Anyone Write the Encyclopedia and Relied on the Community to Check It. For Seven Years the Most Prolific Member of the Community Was an American Teenager Who Did Not Speak Scots.

The Method

The Checkers

The Training Data

The Apology

The Cleanup

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