#scots wikipedia

im angry and im devastated and im so so sorry for all scottish people and scots speakers. what that teenager did is inexcusable and, by the looks of it, irreparable. i don’t think people realise how much power wikipedia can hold and how much it can affect people, especially native/heritage speakers of a minority or endangered language. for a lot of those communities, wikipedia is the only freely accessible online source in their native language. not only that, people who do not speak those languages/dialects will look to the same sources for information on that language/dialect, and in this case, when they find out that scots is supposedly just badly spelled english, attitudes shift. all the work that has been done around legitimising the existence of scots as a language is now for nothing. no revitalisation project can have the outreach and participation comparable to wikipedia. the fact that many wikipedias in minority languages or languages without a big internet presence (lilke the cebuano wikipedia) is created by non-native speakers or bots is a really widespread problem and i don’t think those people necessarily realise the implications of that. i don’t doubt that a lot of them have the best intentions, but i really do hope this is going to be a lesson for all of them.