User:CiphriusKane/Myths about Scots Wikipedia

In August 2020, Scots Wikipedia drew worldwide attention after a Reddit post claimed that most of the wiki had been written in Scotched English, a variety of English designed to look like Scots without being Scots, by a single user. In the furore that ensued, a lot of misinformation has spread. Names have been replaced by numbers to protect the users in question.

Myth 1: It was all the work of one person.

False

There were several people involved, including:
 * The scowiki admin in question (0)
 * An enwiki administrator (1)
 * A Chilean LTA (long term abuser) (2)
 * An English LTA (3)
 * A user involved in 2 global bans (4)
 * An enwiki new page patroller (5)
 * One of the top 1000 enwiki article creators (6)
 * And others...

0 didn't even start editing until 2013, when the Scotching began in 2010.

Myth 2: The admin behind it all was banned.

False

The admin (0) was not banned or blocked. They have edited sporadically since then, but have willingly refrained from major article edits or creations. The only Scotcher that was blocked was the English LTA (3), and the block was enacted after six months of trying to work with them. Two other Scotchers had to be asked to stop their bad edits but both complied.

Myth 3: It's all bad English/Scotched.

Partially true

The issue with the initial report was that it acted as if Central Scots was the only version of Scots (the author was later observed claiming "aroon" was not Scots, even though that is an acceptable spelling in Doric Scots). Further investigation found that several of the supposed "Scotched" words (like aurie, oreeginal and keeng) were actual words that either had niche use cases or were from other dialects, which caused a mix bag of words being misused and dialects mixing. Some words were machine transliterated (e.g. with AWB) without consideration for Scots grammar and some words were just made up, but the extent of the damage was exaggerated. (Aurie refers to an area of green land between buildings used for ball games or an area of a building site for debris but is not a general term for area (that would be area or airt; a cooncil aurie is a rubbish tip); oreeginal was used by the Scots Language Centre; and keeng was found in Douglas Kynoch's A Doric Dictionary. Acome however, is a Scotched word made up on the basis of be- becoming a- being a universal rule)

Myth 4: The wiki was Scotched until 2020.

Partially true

This statement is deceptive as it implies that the Scotching happened during the entirety of Scowiki's history, when it only began in 2010. The wiki itself was started in 2005, and the Scotchers took over in 2010 following the dismissal of the last Scots-speaking admin for inactivity.

Myth 5: The issue was all the content was Scotched.

False

There were other issues, including a persistent promotion of quantity over quality. The majority of the pages, rather than being Scotched versions of enwiki articles, were single-sentence unreferenced stubs that barely had enough content to Scotch.

Myth 6: Everything written by the Scotching admin was deleted.

False

At time of writing, 66% of articles created by (0) has been deleted. Despite demands by outsiders and 0's willingness, the new Scots wiki community felt like mass deletion was a bad move, and the community continues to maintain it is their responsibility to deal with the mess. Mass deletions only began after it was deemed to be too big a problem for them to handle as is. At time of writing, there is a special speedy deletion category targeting articles made by any listed Scotcher deemed to be low quality, but is only used to delete articles that demonstrate issues raised in myth 5.

Myth 7: The Scotcher made up the spellings themself.

False

Examining historical revisions of articles shows words such as "seestem" were in use well before the 2010-2020 period. While the modern community may have chosen to reject such spellings, they were a thing in the wiki's early days, and it's understandable why a non-speaker may pick up on them.

Myth 8: It's still all Scotched.

The community is small, and a lot less quantity-over-quality focused. There are still a lot of issues, but we are slowly chipping away at what is there. Featured articles and DYK articles have been verified as being actual Scots.

I am the Scots Wikipaedia administrator. I signed up to Wikipedia in September 2020, in response to the news. I was initially offered an admin position by one of the admins at the time but rejected it on the grounds of having just created my account though I'd had 10 years of admin experience on a fan wiki at that point. In December 2020, I requested adminship and became the third new admin. To date, I am the only active admin, as the other 2 admins and all pre-stooshie admins have gone inactive and lost their tools with 1 exception. I have invested a lot of time into the wiki and created this to combat the frequent false statements I see being thrown around, so please take what I have written as truth.