Unfortunately, it isn't just a Wikipedia thing, and the headlines and article titles are going to make people miss another problem. There are a whole bunch of English-to-Scots translations on Wikidata and Wiktionary that were added by the same person. Wikidata in particular was designed to be machine-scrapeable, so there are an awful lot of translators on the WWW that will now tell you that the Scots for "Italian cuisine" is "Italian cuisine".
This is certainly true. After reading about this controversy, I wanted to get a feel for the level of mutual intelligibility between Scots and English. To do this, I tried to search for a translation of The Lord’s Prayer in Scots to compare to the English version but up came this Wikipedia page (https://sco.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laird%27s_Prayer), which might be fine but I can’t be sure. And then I realized I couldn’t really trust any of the other top results not to be copied from Wikipedia either.
Due to all the reports of mangled English (which is indeed a problem), a lot of people seem to have the false impression that real Scots is wildly different to English. The Scots for "Italian cuisine" is in fact "Italian cuisine".
It's ridiculous incident but it's also overstated, I haven't seen any decent translators with Scots support but if they were based on that wiki they'd probably tell you that the Scots translation of "to know" is "tae ken" which is perfectly correct. It might also tell you that the Scots word for physics is "pheesics" instead of "physics" but how faith should you be putting in a public wiki as a data source in the first place?
I fully agree. As I understand it, the user was a teenager who did not know better and thought they made a sincere effort to contribute. Young and/or inexperienced contributors are prone to make somewhat similar mistakes, albeit usually less extreme. What message would it send if they were punished for this?
[+] [-] JdeBP|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] stevula|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] flooq|5 years ago|reply
It's ridiculous incident but it's also overstated, I haven't seen any decent translators with Scots support but if they were based on that wiki they'd probably tell you that the Scots translation of "to know" is "tae ken" which is perfectly correct. It might also tell you that the Scots word for physics is "pheesics" instead of "physics" but how faith should you be putting in a public wiki as a data source in the first place?
[+] [-] dang|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sreekotay|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] timkam|5 years ago|reply