Wikipedia: Difference between revisions
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===Scots Wikipedia scandal=== | ===Scots Wikipedia scandal=== | ||
In August 2020, a [[Reddit]] user publicized that a prolific Scots Wikipedia administrator did not speak the Scots language; tens of thousands of articles were in fact English with eye dialect spellings to suggest a Scottish accent, or word-by-word machine translations of articles from the English Wikipedia. Wikimedia users debated recruiting fluent speakers of Scots to repair the articles, reverting all edits from the administrator in question, or — as the latter would entail removing nearly half the articles in the encyclopedia — even deleting and restarting Scots Wikipedia afresh. ''The Guardian'' attributed the problem to systemic issues in Wikipedia culture, suggesting that some administrators are afforded effectively unchecked power based on sheer volume of edits (rather than the quality of their work). Robyn Speer, chief scientist at Luminoso, expressed concern that artificial intelligence corpora which used Wikipedia for language-training data had been corrupted by the pseudo-Scots.<ref name="inews">{{Cite web |last=McDonald |first=Karl |title=Scots Wikipedia taken over by American teenager who wrote thousands of 'very odd' articles without learning language |url=https://inews.co.uk/news/scotland/scots-wikipedia-language-articles-native-speaker-mistakes-610689 |website=The i Paper |date=26 Aug 2020 |access-date=15 Feb 2026 |url-status=live |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20200826132225/https://inews.co.uk/news/scotland/scots-wikipedia-language-articles-native-speaker-mistakes-610689 |archive-date=26 Aug 2020}}</ref><ref>{{Cite web |last1=Brooks |first1=Libby |last2=Hern |first2=Alex |title=Shock an aw: US teenager wrote huge slice of Scots Wikipedia <!-- sic. --> |url=https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2020/aug/26/shock-an-aw-us-teenager-wrote-huge-slice-of-scots-wikipedia | In August 2020, a [[Reddit]] user publicized that a prolific Scots Wikipedia administrator did not speak the Scots language; tens of thousands of articles were in fact English with eye dialect spellings to suggest a Scottish accent, or word-by-word machine translations of articles from the English Wikipedia. Wikimedia users debated recruiting fluent speakers of Scots to repair the articles, reverting all edits from the administrator in question, or — as the latter would entail removing nearly half the articles in the encyclopedia — even deleting and restarting Scots Wikipedia afresh. ''The Guardian'' attributed the problem to systemic issues in Wikipedia culture, suggesting that some administrators are afforded effectively unchecked power based on sheer volume of edits (rather than the quality of their work). Robyn Speer, chief scientist at Luminoso, expressed concern that artificial intelligence corpora which used Wikipedia for language-training data had been corrupted by the pseudo-Scots.<ref name="inews">{{Cite web |last=McDonald |first=Karl |title=Scots Wikipedia taken over by American teenager who wrote thousands of 'very odd' articles without learning language |url=https://inews.co.uk/news/scotland/scots-wikipedia-language-articles-native-speaker-mistakes-610689 |website=The i Paper |date=26 Aug 2020 |access-date=15 Feb 2026 |url-status=live |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20200826132225/https://inews.co.uk/news/scotland/scots-wikipedia-language-articles-native-speaker-mistakes-610689 |archive-date=26 Aug 2020}}</ref><ref>{{Cite web |last1=Brooks |first1=Libby |last2=Hern |first2=Alex |date=26 Aug 2020 |title=Shock an aw: US teenager wrote huge slice of Scots Wikipedia <!-- sic. --> |url=https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2020/aug/26/shock-an-aw-us-teenager-wrote-huge-slice-of-scots-wikipedia |url-status=live |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20200826163024/https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2020/aug/26/shock-an-aw-us-teenager-wrote-huge-slice-of-scots-wikipedia |archive-date=26 Aug 2020 |access-date=15 Feb 2026 |website=The Guardian}}</ref><ref>{{Cite web |last=McCarthy |first=Kieren |title=Um, almost the entire Scots Wikipedia was written by someone with no idea of the language – 10,000s of articles |url=https://www.theregister.com/2020/08/26/scots_wikipedia_fake/ |website=The Register |date=26 Aug 2020 |access-date=15 Feb 2026 |url-status=live |archive-url=http://web.archive.org/web/20260211102214/https://www.theregister.com/2020/08/26/scots_wikipedia_fake/ |archive-date=11 Feb 2026}}</ref> | ||
==References== | ==References== | ||