Scots Wikipedia Articles Vandalism

Submission 20,012

Part of a series on /his/. [View Related Entries]

About

Scots Wikipedia Articles Vandalism refers to a controversy surrounding thousands of articles found on Scots Wikipedia that are, instead of Scots, written in mangled English.

Origin

On August 25th 2020, a thread was made on the 4chan /his/ board that started a discussion about dozens of articles on Scots Wikipedia that weren't even written in Scots, but in broken English with a few Scots words in them. It was discovered that most of them were written just by one American (now 19 years old) teenager, with a username AmaryllisGardener, who has been writing them for more than 7 years.

Spread

Later that day, the issue started to be discussed on various other boards and eventually was posted on r/Scotland by user Ultach, who said that AmaryllisGardener "has possibly done more damage to the Scots language than anyone else in history."^[1] The Reddit post was more detailed and included more examples of mistakes found in the texts, such as:

For example, they consistently translate “also” as “an aw” in every context. So, Charles V would be “king o the Holy Roman Empire and an aw Spain [sic]”, and “Pascal an aw wrote in defence o the scienteefic method [sic]”. I think they did this because when you type “also” into the Online Scots Dictionary, “an aw” is the first thing that comes up. If they’d ever read any Scots writing or even talked to a Scottish person they would’ve realised you can’t really use it in that way.

Wikipedia could have been an invaluable resource for the struggling language. Instead, it’s just become another source of ammunition for people wanting to disparage and mock it, all because of this one person and their bizarre fixation on Scots, which unfortunately never extended so far as wanting to properly learn it.

After Internet users found other AmaryllisGardener's social media accounts, including his Twitter and Reddit, the fact that he seemed to be a part of Furry and My Little Pony fandom made him even a bigger subject to online harassment which led to him making his Twitter account private (later deleting it) and editing his Wikipedia bio (shown below).

Later that day, Ultach's post was linked on Twitter by a user Robyn Speer, which helped the issue to get even more attention.

AmaryllisGardener gave people a response in a thread on Wikipedia:^[2]

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.

On August 27th and 28th, media outlets began covering the controversy, such as The Guardian^[3] and Vice.^[4]

Since the number of articles is huge and correcting them all would require lots of time, some people proposed deleting the whole Scots Wikipedia. This idea was however rejected by Daria Cybulska, the director of programmes and evaluation at Wikimedia UK, who responded with the following:^[3]

We are aware of the concerns that have emerged about the content of the Scots-language Wikipedia and are in touch with the Wikimedia Foundation and volunteer editor community to offer support in helping to ensure that these issues are addressed.
We are exploring ways of supporting the existing Scots Wikipedia editor community, by offering help with editing training for newcomers, facilitating partnerships with authoritative language organisations and organising editing events to harness current interest and energy.