The Scots Wikipedia thing is changing the way I think about the Internet and minority languages.
What happened?
Earlier this week [originally written August 28, 2020], a viral Reddit post alleged that a single editor — a non-Scots-speaking American — of the Scots-language Wikipedia has flooded the wiki with, essentially, mangled English articles translated into fake Scots, mostly by substituting word-for-word using an English-Scots dictionary. (The user in question seems to have acted in good faith; he started as a child and has apologized). Other non-Scots-speaking editors have also made many low-quality contributions. Apparently, there was never a sufficient community of actual Scots speakers on Wikipedia to keep the poor-quality “Scotched English” in check and fill the wiki with authentic Scots articles. Now the Scots Wikipedia community is stuck with the question of what to do with this fiasco of a Wikipedia: delete it, roll back to an older version, mobilize the Scots-speaking community to fix all the articles?
For background, Scots is one of Scotland’s two native minority languages. Whereas Scottish Gaelic is a Celtic language related to Irish, Scots is essentially an English dialect, having split off from Middle English and developed mostly separately for centuries. Scots split off earlier, and is more distinct from standard English, than other English varieties around the world. “Broad” Scots — i.e. Scots with less influence from English, is largely unintelligible to English speakers who aren’t familiar with it, although many speakers use mixed varieties that are heavily influenced by Scottish Standard English.
It’s difficult to say for sure how many people speak Scots. 2011 census data suggest that the number of self-reported speakers was about 1.5 million. The future of the language is uncertain as new generations might abandon it for English, while others might renew their commitment out of resurgent Scottish nationalism or pride. What’s for sure is that most people who speak Scots at home and in their communities still prefer to read and write English, especially for the sort of content that typically goes on Wikipedia.
Wikipedia is a uniquely hard challenge for poorly-standardized spoken languages
I’ve noticed a lot of Scots speakers commenting along the lines of “I want to help, but I don’t feel qualified.” It isn’t only that Scots speakers don’t feel comfortable writing encyclopedic articles in a mostly-spoken language. Rather, there is a more pervasive problem with this kind of project. Unlike most major languages, there isn’t a standard form of Scots that everyone can agree on. For starters, there are several variants (Doric, Lallans, and Ulster) that are pretty distinct from each other. Plus, even within each dialect group, there aren’t established spelling norms. When an editor sees an article that’s written in something very different than their personal Scots idiolect, it can be hard to add to it without starting over. It makes a lot of sense that most Scots speakers might speak, and even sometimes write, Scots, but still don’t want to edit Wikipedia. Especially considering its sorry past and present state, which has now been handed to them saying, “we screwed this up, but you fix it.
A case study of behavior on the Internet?
There have been three main kinds of responses to the situation: first, hate and harassment directed at the offending editor and the frankly offensive state of Scots Wikipedia as of August 2020. Second, mocking the ridiculousness of the whole situation. Third, constructive discussion regarding what to do about it.
We’ve fragmented ourselves into specific little communities, and you can see the different character of responses on Wikipedia, Twitter, and different subreddits like r/linguistics, r/scotland, r/badlinguistics, etc. Like a prism, the structure of internet communities has divided the aspects of communication into parallel streams. That puts a huge responsibility on us to be proactive about staying informed and thinking critically, while also ensuring civility wins out over trolls.
Wikipedia is often held up as a triumph of collective human goodness (All of human knowledge! For free! For everyone and by everyone!). But under that surface there is a lot of chaos. Although the vast majority of information on Wikipedia is true, it cannot avoid bias when its editors are a small and not very diverse group that does not represent its communities of readers, and often fails to include people from communities that are relevant to articles with historical or cultural content. There have been big problems: most notably, Croatian Wikipedia has been taken over by Neo-Nazis (there is a Serbo-Croatian Wikipedia in substantially the same language where things seem to be more normal).
Is this kind of thing a threat to the language?
The original Reddit post suggested that the user might have “done more damage to the Scots language than anyone else in history.” If that sounds crazy, think of how many people might have followed a link to Scots Wikipedia not knowing what it was, seen something that looks like English transcribed in a mocking Scottish accent, and concluded that Scots isn’t a real language — and a ridiculous non-language at that — unintentionally compounding centuries of cultural marginalization. Although I’m somewhat optimistic that the reaction to this situation could be constructive, it should go without saying: Don’t pass off a shallow imitation of someone else’s culture as the real thing on the internet!
For more about Scots language, I suggest looking at the Scots Language Centre, the Open University course, the Dictionary of the Scots Language, or the works of the great poet Robert Burns.