Almost every article on the Scots version of Wikipedia is written by one American teenager who can’t speak Scots

lol wut?

They’re volunteers. Nobody at wikipedia makes anyone do anything. What’s you’re damage?

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@TacoChucks and @orenwolf – the thought of a child fascinated and then obsessed with a language, words he loved, and happily laboring years without a teacher or mentor, ignorant of his ignorance, cheerfully proud of his perpetual creation and blind …finally having his eyes opened to the monstrosity of it all.

Profoundly sad. Funny, too, yes. But I feel like crying the way Flowers For Algernon made me cry.

It’s also difficult to believe for a DECADE nobody contacted the writer directly to set him straight. Nobody was watching, nobody cared. It sounds like people griped but. . . this story just blows my mind.

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Wik(ipedia)

Also wik

Also also wik

Wi not trei a holiday in Sweeden this yer ?

See the loveli lakes

The wonderful telephone system

And mani interesting furry animals

Including the majestic moose

A moose once bit my sister…

No realli! She was Karving her initials on the moose with the sharpened end
of an interspace toothbrush given her by Svenge - her brother-in-law - an
Oslo
dentist and star of many Norwegian movies: “The Hot Hands of an Oslo
Dentist”,
“Fillings of Passion”, “The Huge Molars of Horst Nordfink”…

Mynd you, moose bites Kan be pretti nasti…

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We apologise again for the fault in the subtitles. Those responsible for sacking the people who have just been sacked have been sacked.

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As a fellow Scot/south Ayrshire lass living in New Zealand, I can relate to not being understood jimbydude. Tried to ask for a bag of ice at the liquor store the other day and, after repeating myself several times, had to resort to asking for a bag of frozen water cubes for cooling your drink! I didn’t think my accent was that broad!

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Suddenly I feel like someone should check the Swedish version of Wikipedia…

(bork bork bork)

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Is there an equivalent Scottish expression to “plastic paddy”?

That perfectly sums up what I was thinking once I found out that the editor really did all this by hand. I had previously assumed they’d probably automated some of it.

And thanks for reminding me of “Flowers For Algernon” :grinning:

There’s an English wikipedia page for plastic paddy, and if you’re really curious I could refer you to someone who might be able to create a Scots version for you.

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Well, the German etymology for brav is that to comes from the French brave and the Italian bravo, which themselves come from the Vulgar Latin barbarus. So which route it took into Scots is open. Maybe from the Flemish?

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On the other hand, a colleague who is a native Romanian speaker told me that she (and other Romanians) can understand spoken Italian, but Italians can’t understand spoken Romanian.

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Just to ruin your day, I present you with the appropriate TVTropes article

…EDIT: And this one!

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‘Frae Embra’ :wink:

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aluminium albannach?

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Let’s aim higher. I hope he actually receives appreciation and support for, on a macro level over the course of time, identifying a systemic issue before it was used maliciously, and leads to solutions that help society, and as a side effect unites the Scots language community and spurs it to action.

One can only imagine the next chapters involving a trip to Scotland and becoming part of an independence campaign there made possible by the renewed enthusiasm and coordination involved in reclaiming the language.

I, for one, would invest in crowdfunding the movie version of this.

Or at the very least, an educational trip for the original author.

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Does the world actually need any version of Wikipedia? No. It survived perfectly well without one for centuries, and would continue perfectly well should Wikipedia vanish utterly tomorrow.

Does Wikipedia make the world a better place? Yes, I would say so. I can find out all sorts of interesting stuff that in my teenage years would have required a trip to the local library (an institution under ever increasing threat).

Does a specifically Scots version of Wikipedia make the world a better place? How about the Interlingua version, or the Tok Pisin one*? Yes, because variety is brilliant and homogeneity is sterile and boring.

We don’t need a Scots Wikipedia, but we also don’t need Occitan poetry or Tuvan throat singing. That doesn’t stop them being delightful cultural gems, the absence of which would impoverish us all.

* “Wikipedia emi olsem traipela buk igat planti toksave insait long planti samting - long Tok Inglis, nem bilong dispela kain buk emi encyclopedia .”

Translation, as best I can: “Wikipedia is like a great big book that has plenty of knowledge inside about lots of subjects - in English, the name of this kind of book is ‘encyclopedia’.”

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What I meant is you can get the Scottish word for that if you ask the editor who created the Scots version of wikipedia to translate said article. I found that a lot funnier when I wrote it, though.

Man walks into a Scottish bakery and asks, “Is that a doughnut or a meringue?”

Baker says, “No you’re right, it’s a doughnut.”

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If you read more of the edits/arguments by the author, you can see that he feels immersed in this: at a couple of places he references “we” as if he is part of a Scots-speaking community, though he hasn’t so much as visited. As a certified armchair psychiatrist, I suggest further assessments be done to explore his lack of identity with his local community alongside this multi-year identification with Scots. Identifying with a diagnosis (“I have OCD”) isn’t helpful either. Many people across various spectra can hyperfocus but for 7 years?

From 12-19 is a unique time in the formation of identity: what kind of life does this kid have that shuts him into mucking around with a language he doesn’t know, doesn’t understand and frankly doesn’t have that much curiosity about? Scotland is an actual place with real people, a history and culture that predates the Act of Union and all he seemed to recognize is accented English and a few odd slang words that have crossed over.

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That analogy is … flawed, to say the least.
Tuvan throat singing serves a very tangible purpose - to Tuvan throat singers at the very least, or else they wouldn’t still be doing it.
Some day this may change, the singers will focus on something else instead, and Tuvan throat singing will become a historical artifact, much like Occitan poetry has.

But if you’re seriously arguing that the purpose of a Scots version of Wikipedia should be to serve as a “delightful cultural gem”, then I submit that the Scots Wikipedia is at it’s peak RIGHT NOW while it is still a Henry Darger-esque maze of misinterpretation and outright fantasies. If anything, we ought to freeze it in time and prevent those pesky Scots from turning it into an accurate representation of their language, thereby ruining a lot of the delightful gem-ness.

Can you tell that I find this entire viewpoint both patronizing and fetishizing? :slight_smile:
The notion of creating an completist offspring of much less extensive Wikipedias right next to the main one has always seemed both counterintuitive and condescending to me. It’s like getting assigned your own little playspace next to the adults table.