Linked List: October 5, 2020

Monday, 5 October 2020

Most of Scottish Wikipedia Was Written by an American in Mangled ‘Groundskeeper Willie’-Style English 

Edward Ongweso Jr., writing for Vice back in August:

For over six years, one Wikipedia user — AmaryllisGardener — has written well over 23,000 articles on the Scots Wikipedia and done well over 200,000 edits. The only problem is that AmaryllisGardener isn’t Scottish, they don’t speak Scots, and none of their articles are written in Scots.

Since 2013, this user — a self-professed Christian INTP furry living somewhere in North Carolina — has simply written articles that are written in English, riddled with misspellings that mimic a spoken Scottish accent. Many of the articles were written while they were a teenager. AmaryllisGardener is an admin of the Scots Wikipedia, and Wikipedians now have no idea what to do, because AmaryllisGardener’s influence over the country’s pages has been so vast that their only options seem to be to delete the Scots language version entirely or revert the entire thing back to 2012. […]

On a page about the movie Million Dollar Baby, AmaryllisGardener wrote “This film is aboot an unnerappreciatit boxin trainer.” This sort of language is repeated across all 23,000 articles they wrote, as well as in the articles they edited; because they are an admin of the site, they have the ability to control much of what ultimately stays on it.

Says AmaryllisGardener on their talk page: “If I had to do over I would’ve kept to more cleanup and just keeping the wiki up and running instead of writing articles, but I meant the best.”

Jake Tapper: ‘Get Well and Get It Together’ 

Jake Tapper, on CNN’s State of the Union:

I wish you all health and recovery and a long life. But we have to note the tragedy here. It is horrible, and awful, and profound. Sick and in isolation, Mr. President, you have become a symbol of your own failures — failures of recklessness, ignorance, arrogance — the same failures you have been inflicting on the rest of us. Get well and please — for the rest of us who don’t get to go to Walter Reed — get well and get it together.

Four minutes of pure truth.

Roger Angell at a Hundred 

Speaking of Roger Angell, he recently celebrated his 100th birthday, and the occasion was nicely captured by this short piece by Mark Singer in (of course) The New Yorker.

K: The Overlooked Variable That’s Driving the Pandemic 

Zeynep Tufekci, writing for The Atlantic:

Unfortunately, averages aren’t always useful for understanding the distribution of a phenomenon, especially if it has widely varying behavior. If Amazon’s CEO, Jeff Bezos, walks into a bar with 100 regular people in it, the average wealth in that bar suddenly exceeds $1 billion. If I also walk into that bar, not much will change. Clearly, the average is not that useful a number to understand the distribution of wealth in that bar, or how to change it. Sometimes, the mean is not the message. Meanwhile, if the bar has a person infected with COVID-19, and if it is also poorly ventilated and loud, causing people to speak loudly at close range, almost everyone in the room could potentially be infected — a pattern that’s been observed many times since the pandemic begin, and that is similarly not captured by R. That’s where the dispersion comes in.

Another must-read piece from Tufekci. The CDC and WHO have both been way too slow to acknowledge the ways that this virus actually spreads and adapt their mitigation advice accordingly. It doesn’t spread like influenza at all. Super-spreading events are the key.