#scots wikipedia

[allthingslinguistic]

A Teen Threw Scots Wiki Into Chaos and It Highlights a Massive Problem With Wikipedia

Back in 2013, a 12-year-old American with an enthusiasm for the Scots language decided to contribute to the Scots Wikipedia. For seven years, they edited tens of thousands of articles with little oversight. Then, a Reddit post blew everything up.

An overview article of the Scots Wikipedia saga, which provides useful context about how editing issues come to happen in smaller-language Wikipedias. Excerpt:  

Back in 2013, a 12-year-old American with an enthusiasm for the Scots language decided to contribute to the Scots Wikipedia. For seven years, they edited tens of thousands of articles with little oversight. Then, a Reddit post blew everything up.

The problem here was the teen in question is not a native Scots speaker and was a prolific contributor for a small wiki. Several Wikipedia admins and editors familiar with the situation have reached out to Gizmodo, and by all accounts, the teen was acting in good faith and meant no harm. It’s the sort of earnest and naive attempt to help that sometimes ends up doing more harm than intended.

That hasn’t stopped the backlash. Sure, you might write off this teen as lacking common sense, but the question remains: How did a single person, a teenager at that, have this much free reign for such a long period of time over what is largely considered to be a reference platform? [...]

Scots Wikipedia may be the latest, and perhaps most well-known example thus far, but multiple Wikipedia editors emailed Gizmodo to bring attention to other examples of smaller wiki projects facing similar problems.

Read the whole thing. 

[lingthusiasm]

Lingthusiasm Episode 49: How translators approach a text

Before even starting to translate a work, a translator needs to make several important macro-level decisions, such as whether to more closely follow the literal structure of the text or to adapt more freely, especially if the original text does things that are unfamiliar to readers in the destination language but would be familiar to readers in the original language. 

In this episode of Lingthusiasm, your hosts Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne get enthusiastic about the relationship of the translator and the text. We talk about the new, updated translation of Beowulf by Maria Dahvana Headley (affectionately known as the "bro" translation), reading the Tale of Genji in multiple translations, translating conlangs in fiction, and mistranslation on the Scots Wikipedia. 

Click here for a link to this episode in your podcast player of choice or read the transcript here

Announcements

We’re coming up on Lingthusiasm’s fourth anniversary! In celebration, we’re asking you to help people who would totally enjoy listening to fun conversations about linguistics, they just don’t realize it exists yet! Most people still find podcasts through word of mouth, and we’ve seen a significant bump in listens each November when we ask you to help share the show, so we know this works. If you tag us @lingthusiasm on social media in your recommendation post, we will like/retweet/reshare/thank you as appropriate, or if you send a recommendation to a specific person, we won’t know about it but you can still feel a warm glow of satisfaction at helping out (and feel free to still tell us about it on social media if you’d like to be thanked!). Trying to think of what to say? One option is to pick a particular episode that you liked and share a link to that. 

This month’s bonus episode was about honorifics, words like titles and forms of “you” that express when you’re trying to be extra polite to someone (and which can also be subverted to be rude or intimate). Get access to this and 43 other bonus episodes at patreon.com/lingthusiasm.

This is also a good time to start thinking about linguistics merch and other potential gift ideas (paperback copies of Because Internet, anyone?), in time for them to arrive via the internet, if you’re ordering for the holiday season. Check out the Lingthusiasm merch store at lingthusiasm.com/merch.  

Here are the links mentioned in this episode:

Lingthusiasm Episode 18: Translating the untranslatable

Beowulf, translation by Maria Dahvana Headley

A “Beowulf” for Our Moment (New Yorker)

Gretchen reads Beowulf (twitter thread)

The Sensualist: What makes “The Tale of Genji” so seductive (New Yorker)

Shadowscent, by P.M Freestone

How I made the Aramteskan language (Superlinguo)

Scots Wikipedia (Wikipedia article)

Wikipedia has a Google Translate problem (The Verge)

Gretchen’s twitter thread about Scots Wikipedia

You can listen to this episode via Lingthusiasm.com, Soundcloud, RSS, Apple Podcasts/iTunes, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts. You can also download an mp3 via the Soundcloud page for offline listening.

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Lingthusiasm is on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, and Tumblr. Email us at contact [at] lingthusiasm [dot] com

Gretchen is on Twitter as @GretchenAMcC and blogs at All Things Linguistic.

Lauren is on Twitter as @superlinguo and blogs at Superlinguo.

Lingthusiasm is created by Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne. Our senior producer is Claire Gawne, our production editor is Sarah Dopierala, our production manager is Liz McCullough, and our music is ‘Ancient City’ by The Triangles.

This episode of Lingthusiasm is made available under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial Share Alike license (CC 4.0 BY-NC-SA).

[wordfully]

im angry and im devastated and im so so sorry for all scottish people and scots speakers. what that teenager did is inexcusable and, by the looks of it, irreparable. i don’t think people realise how much power wikipedia can hold and how much it can affect people, especially native/heritage speakers of a minority or endangered language. for a lot of those communities, wikipedia is the only freely accessible online source in their native language. not only that, people who do not speak those languages/dialects will look to the same sources for information on that language/dialect, and in this case, when they find out that scots is supposedly just badly spelled english, attitudes shift. all the work that has been done around legitimising the existence of scots as a language is now for nothing. no revitalisation project can have the outreach and participation comparable to wikipedia. the fact that many wikipedias in minority languages or languages without a big internet presence (lilke the cebuano wikipedia) is created by non-native speakers or bots is a really widespread problem and i don’t think those people necessarily realise the implications of that. i don’t doubt that a lot of them have the best intentions, but i really do hope this is going to be a lesson for all of them.

[unashamedly-glaswegian]

Some teenage American broney: ah ha, Scots is just writing in a funny accent, I shall fuck it up on purpose

Actual Scots:

[averagecontentenjoyer]

aight who had “15 year old brony destroys entire language with wikipedia” for apocalypse bingo?

[sebbytrash]

Okay, seeing all these posts and comments on the whole Scots Wikipedia thing has me just wanting to say one thing

I spent my whole life being told that the way I speak, my language, made me sound common and uneducated. I was told to speak properly, speak "English. That to the outside world, I sounded unintelligible at best or a joke at worst. Harsh, violent, ridiculous.

So yes, it is important to us.

[skeltonjunction]

greetings americans.

read this post, and specifically pay attention to the bit that says “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”

recognise that “scottish people twitter” isn’t the joke you think it is, because if you actually cared about vulnerable indigenous languages you wouldn’t treat their use as a punchline

actually, you know what, “bri ish people talk like” jokes aren’t funny either which you’d know if you were aware of the ties between dialect & class and recognise the intentional suppression of non-rp-english languages and regional dialects as a tactic in disenfranchising and demonising the working class, especially post-deindustrialisation

celebrate vibrant & varying language, dialect, and vernacular, even in countries you like to mock

and stop trying to imitate languages & dialects you have no knowledge of, it’s embarrassing at best

[tributary]

the american who managed the scots wikipedia page despite not knowing the language is No True Scotsman