By Joel Hruska.
Wikipedia is, in my opinion, one of the most successful ventures devoted to the dissemination of knowledge on the entire internet. It isn’t perfect — no encyclopedia or institution is — but it has had a profound effect on the decentralization of knowledge over the past two decades.
Some of that knowledge, however, has been a little more accurate than others. Somehow — and I say “somehow” because I genuinely have no idea how this got missed — nearly 24,000 articles on the Scots language Wikipedia have been written by one American who speaks not a word of Scots. His “entries” consist of English written in what the author imagines is a Scottish accent. Read more»
Resources
- How To Subscribe To Heidelmedia
- Wikipedia Co-Founder: Wikipedia Is Now Openly Biased By Policy
- Why You Should Not Trust Wikipedia
- The Cult of Wikipedia
- Student Hoaxes “Reputable” Media Outlets Via Wikipedia
- How Does Facebook “Fact Checking” Work?
- Is Wikipedia Becoming a Fence for Stolen Goods?
- What Is Astroturfing And Why Does It Matter?
R. Scott Clark
R.Scott Clark is the President of the Heidelberg Reformation Association, the author and editor of, and contributor to several books and the author of many articles. He has taught church history and historical theology since 1997 at Westminster Seminary California. He has also taught at Wheaton College, Reformed Theological Seminary, and Concordia University. He has hosted the Heidelblog since 2007.
More by R. Scott Clark ›
24,000 articles is an average of ten articles a day since the American started on Wikipedia. I can’t believe he/she actually wrote all that and then laboriously “translated” it into “Scots” using an online dictionary. I think it more likely he/she used an online translator (Google Translate doesn’t do Scots, but there is other translating software out there that claims to), and, possibly even copied and pasted articles already on the English Wikipedia into that translation software. This is OK – Wikipedia is not after original work; so long as copyright is not actually breached, “plagiarise, plagiarise, plagiarise” as much as you like, and you don’t even have to “make sure you call it research”. Articles are not signed, but Wikipedia does allow one to identify the author’s ID from the history, together with all editors and the versions they produced (Almost! I once found an edit by someone else that corroborated what I had entered, but when I edited the article again, I found that that editor and their work had got scrubbed by the system. Frustrating, as it was the only corroboration of my entries that I had had access to, so I am unable to share my knowledge of that subject on Wikipedia, as what I write gets scrubbed owing to lack of evidence. Fortunately it’s only about something in classical music, not about theology).
Wikipedia are trying to cater for all languages and may be posting totally ham-handed articles in a particular language in the hope that someone more knowledgeable will edit them, just in order to have some sort of presence in that language.
Tha seo sporsail! This is funny! Thankfully this could not occur with Gaelic as you would have to know the language and there are few outside the Gaidhealtachd who do. “Scot” is a nationality not an ethnicity – you are either “Gaidheal no Gall” – Gael (Highlander) or Stranger.