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.”

★ Monday, 5 October 2020