Maybe I'm too empathic but reading the last statement they left on their discussion page is just soul-crushing to me and honestly, it makes quite sad that people seem to assume malice and go...
Maybe I'm too empathic but reading the last statement they left on their discussion page is just soul-crushing to me and honestly, it makes quite sad that people seem to assume malice and go harass him.. I think making a public post about it in the way it was done was a grave mistake.
Honestly, I don't mind if you revert all of my edits, delete my articles, and ban me from the wiki for good. I've already found out that my "contributions" have angered countless people, and to me that's all the devastation I can be given, after years of my thinking I was doing good (and yes, obsessively editing). I was only a 12-year-old kid when I started, and sometimes when you start something young, you can't see that the habit you've developed is unhealthy and unhelpful as you get older. I don't care about defending myself, I only want to stop being harassed on my social medias (and to stop my other friends who have nothing to do with the wiki from being harassed as well). Whether peace can be achieved by scowiki being kept like it is or extensively reformed to wipe my influence from it makes no difference to me now that I know that I've done no good anyway. --AmaryllisGardener talk 21:57, 25 August 2020 (UTC)
No I think that's very appropriate. It seems rare on the internet to come across something that is simultaneously both such an obvious work of passion with only the best of intentions, and also...
Exemplary
Maybe I'm too empathic
No I think that's very appropriate. It seems rare on the internet to come across something that is simultaneously both such an obvious work of passion with only the best of intentions, and also such a huge mistake with some far reaching implications.
This person put in years and years of effort doing something they believed was right. That in itself deserves respect. There's tremendous opportunity here to help steer this person in a good direction, there's no need for punishment. The horrifying realization that they're probably undergoing right now is more than enough.
Were there other options? Wikipedia is unfortunately a black hole if you, an outsider (i.e. not a mod, editor, or administrator), try to report something is wrong, especially given the scale of...
I think making a public post about it in the way it was done was a grave mistake.
Were there other options? Wikipedia is unfortunately a black hole if you, an outsider (i.e. not a mod, editor, or administrator), try to report something is wrong, especially given the scale of what was happening here.
If anything, the onus is on Wikimedia for even letting it get so far. It's wild that nobody there realized that an administrator of one of their alternative language sites obviously didn't even speak that language. I don't speak Scots but I could tell at a glance that it was very wrong.
I think creating an RFC would've been good enough. It would've atleast made the conversation not thrown into mainstream. Heck, talking to another admin or anyone at wikimedia or even the user...
I think creating an RFC would've been good enough. It would've atleast made the conversation not thrown into mainstream. Heck, talking to another admin or anyone at wikimedia or even the user themselves. From the post, it seems they have done none of that and just went straight to Reddit to make a hit piece on the user and Wikipedia itself. I think that's inexcusably the worst option that could've been taken. I can't think of something worse. Please do not encourage this type of behaviour.
As of whether they should be admin, I think the answer is obviously no since they can't do that job effectively. However, seeing as this is the case, it simply goes to show that no one else was willing to put the time into it because I have no doubt that someone who knows Scot could do a better job given the will to do so. I have to respect them for at the very least trying even if it created this whole mess.
I agree that this wasn't handled well overall, but I think it's worth mentioning that a lot of the fault doesn't really come directly from the person that originally made the post, but from other...
Exemplary
I agree that this wasn't handled well overall, but I think it's worth mentioning that a lot of the fault doesn't really come directly from the person that originally made the post, but from other people that amplified that post in more prominent (and far less relevant) contexts.
They made the post in /r/Scotland, which is a relatively small subreddit that wouldn't normally have many non-Scottish viewers. Then other people took the post and started spreading it to larger subreddits, Twitter, Hacker News, here, etc. And they generally weren't spreading it because it was important information for the outside world—I guarantee that almost everyone that read about this (and often, spread it further) didn't even know a Scots version of Wikipedia existed, and really doesn't care about it at all. A lot of them are just looking for a reason to be smug towards WIkipedia, the user, or various other "targets".
The main issue is really that internet platforms and culture have gotten to a point where this kind of mocking and harassment is normal and even encouraged. Thousands of people end up practically competing to make the most biting comment towards the situation and people involved, and of course that feels very much like harassment to the targets. Some people surely crossed the line into actual, direct harassment.
I think it's likely that the original post's author had no idea that this would end up getting so much attention, and didn't consider these kind of second-degree negative effects. They've added this edit to the top of their post now:
EDIT : I've been told that the editor I've written about has received some harassment for what they've done. This should go without saying but I don't condone this at all. They screwed up and I'm sure they know that by now. They seem like a nice enough person who made a mistake when they were a young child, a mistake which nobody ever bothered to correct, so it's hardly their fault. They're clearly very passionate and dedicated, and with any luck maybe they can use this as an opportunity to learn the language properly and make a positive contribution. If you're reading this I hope you're doing alright and that you're not taking it too personally.
This is the dark side of 'cancel culture' although I worry about using that terminology at all, because what happened here is in my view not analogous to most of what is described as such. I saw...
The main issue is really that internet platforms and culture have gotten to a point where this kind of mocking and harassment is normal and even encouraged. Thousands of people end up practically competing to make the most biting comment towards the situation and people involved, and of course that feels very much like harassment to the targets. Some people surely crossed the line into actual harassment.
This is the dark side of 'cancel culture' although I worry about using that terminology at all, because what happened here is in my view not analogous to most of what is described as such.
I saw this pop up in my social media feeds through a variety of lenses, and one thing that stuck out to me in particular was how the social media outlet really lent itself to the discussion. On Tildes, for example, we have a highly upvoted plea to remember the human. I absolutely love that about this community and want to take a second to thank you, Deimos, for all the work you've put in to helping to create and culture that community.
However, contrast that to reddit and twitter, where the majority of comments and posts are vilifying the user and playing into the fear and damage that this has caused. This is much more reminiscent of mainstream media, which surely will pick up on this eventually and unfortunately vilify this teenager in a similar fashion.
I also saw this pop up in general discussions on discord and slack channels I'm a part of where the conversation was reasonably split. Some users were attacking, others defending. I'm quite glad the communities I've chosen to be a part of have users on both sides and not just users on both sides, but people willing to listen to each other and take both the good and the bad away from this because I do believe that we need to consider the far reaching implications of something like this happening (so that we can help to prevent it in the future) without abandoning the person at the heart of this matter and continuing to be compassionate towards the extreme hate they are likely experiencing right now.
I don't really know how to articulate it either ("cancel culture" isn't the right term), but there's something deeply wrong with our internet. It's something along the lines of the idea that...
I don't really know how to articulate it either ("cancel culture" isn't the right term), but there's something deeply wrong with our internet. It's something along the lines of the idea that everybody is looking down at others for sport. There's a sort of sentiment of supremacy behind it, where everybody is eager for chances to smugly dunk on someone else, or just cheer on someone else's dunk. It's not limited to any one thing, topic, or ideology, either. The nature and target of the dunk is based on the community it's occurring in, and it can come in any flavor.
It's hard to even talk about because addressing it looks like I'm guilty of the same thing I'm addressing (dunking on other social media sites! dunking on those people!), but I promise this isn't a hot take or a way to make myself feel better than someone else. It comes from a place of genuine concern, because the sentiment is seemingly inescapable, and the scale at which it's enabled to happen is staggering. One bad tweet can pull focus for millions of individual and generate tens of thousands of dunks, and this happens in parallel, all the time, constantly. In fact, much of the internet is seemingly designed around digging up the worst examples from targets for the purposes of easy dunks.
I mean at it's root is a deep insecurity. With the world becoming increasingly more visible (and visible in highly skewed ways) its not really that surprising that people are feeling more and more...
It's something along the lines of the idea that everybody is looking down at others for sport. There's a sort of sentiment of supremacy behind it, where everybody is eager for chances to smugly dunk on someone else, or just cheer on someone else's dunk.
I mean at it's root is a deep insecurity. With the world becoming increasingly more visible (and visible in highly skewed ways) its not really that surprising that people are feeling more and more insecure - after all, you're not the one posting bathing suit selfies on a yacht with celebrities, but you're probably surrounded by posts of this nature. We're simultaneously presented with a life that is not accessible to us in both directions from our current state. People are posting the highlights of their life on social media and sources of news are highlighting the absolute lows that humans are capable of. It's no wonder people are insecure and anxious about it, fighting to restore some semblance of normalcy or assure themselves that things aren't really all that bad, I mean, look at this terrible person, at least I'm not them!
In fact, much of the internet is seemingly designed around digging up the worst examples from targets for the purposes of easy dunks.
Is this really any different than how 'gossip' used to be spread? While I believe the internet has amplified some of the worst human qualities, I think at the heart of the issue is insecure people who aren't experiencing enough love in their lives. If only we could find smarter and better ways to harness the internet to spread love and acceptance instead of smugness, vitriol, and hate.
This seems to vary greatly from social circle to social circle, even on the internet. Tildes is a good example of a very different and unique kind of social interaction. I also notice a drastically different kind of conversation (and support) among the EDM community. It's stark to see the difference in chat on the music channels I follow and on the rest of twitch. I wonder if there isn't a way to better harness good intentions and positive vibes more broadly on the internet than through grass roots. Can this be incentivized? I don't know, but I'm hopeful.
So, when I was growing up, adults would always say "bullies are just insecure" as a way of making me feel better, and it rang hollow to little bullied me, and as an adult who now works with...
Exemplary
So, when I was growing up, adults would always say "bullies are just insecure" as a way of making me feel better, and it rang hollow to little bullied me, and as an adult who now works with children, it still rings a little hollow. It's certainly true for some, but for others bullying just seems more a way to enjoy cruelty. While I think you're right in that some of what we see does come from insecurity, I think some of it genuinely is just cruelty for the sake of it -- because it feels good.
In typing this out now I realize that there's another piece here that bothers me: it's not just about dunks, it's also about finding reasons or permission to be cruel. For example, let's say I want to hate on women. If I just come right out and do that I'll likely be shut down (and rightfully so). However, if I instead find an example of a "Karen", then I can go off on her, call her every name in the book, and make all sorts of misogynistic comments about women by proxy of her. Not only that, but I can also be celebrated for all of this, and, probably most importantly, feel downright justified in doing this! Because it's about a "Karen" who clearly deserves it, right? Because we're focused on her behavior, not mine, right?
It's the idea that surfacing someone else's bad behavior earns me a pass for mine. Whenever someone does something shitty, I can use their shittiness to effectively get away with abusive speech, stereotyping, name-calling, body shaming, etc. I say "get away with" which makes it sound like this is a conscious thing, but I think what worries me most is that many wouldn't identify it that way. In fact, I think they would see their cruelty as righteous or just, couched in a larger culture war, and prompted by their target's behavior.
The internet seems to engage in a relentless and constant pursuit of "justified cruelty". As such, it sometimes feels like one big refrain of "but they started it!" from every possible corner. It feels like so many people are either on the hunt for, or simply happy to encounter, "fair game" -- targets that trigger their worst behaviors, all while giving them an intellectual and social permission to do so.
I know this sounds very high-horse. I promise I'm not trying to come across like that. I will readily admit to being susceptible to these forces myself. I've deleted comments here on Tildes that I've written from places of anger, where the wrath I lobbed against my target felt justified to me. Back when I was on reddit I used to love shutting people down. One of my top comments of all time was a sassy, flippant dismissal of someone acting in good faith, and the response it got from the wider community felt so good at the time that it took me way too long to realize that I'd probably done genuine harm to the individual I'd responded to. I'm not immune to these forces and feelings. I don't think anyone is.
What scares me is that I think many people have stopped caring about the harm they might be doing or, even more, feel that the deliberate harm is justified based on who it's aimed at.
Their insecurity certainly doesn't stop the bullying from happening. It's not a great way to soothe someone who has been bullied, either. As you point this out, while I realize I'm trying to...
it rang hollow to little bullied me, and as an adult who now works with children, it still rings a little hollow. It's certainly true for some, but for others bullying just seems more a way to enjoy cruelty.
Their insecurity certainly doesn't stop the bullying from happening. It's not a great way to soothe someone who has been bullied, either. As you point this out, while I realize I'm trying to explain the 'why', it doesn't really solve anything to know why - it might help us to target resources to help people out, but knowing the reasoning behind someone being shitty doesn't change what they're doing or really provide any direct action. There's a million ways they might be insecure, and there's a million ways they should know better than to take it out on others.
I think some of it genuinely is just cruelty for the sake of it -- because it feels good.
This is the heart of what I'm trying to get at. Why does it feel good for them? I think it feels good for them because they are insecure about what control they have over their lives. They are insecure about the kind of people they are, and are desperately looking to shift some of that blame off themselves and onto others.
At least, I desperately hope so because I've seen myself doing similar behavior as a child and I feel it was rooted in my own insecurities and lack of education and empathy. I was able to escape it, and the thought that they might not is deeply unsettling and frightful. I don't want to live in a world where this is an inescapable reality for most humans.
if I instead find an example of a "Karen", then I can go off on her, call her every name in the book, and make all sorts of misogynistic comments about women by proxy of her. Not only that, but I can also be celebrated for all of this, and, probably most importantly, feel downright justified in doing this! Because it's about a "Karen" who clearly deserves it, right? Because we're focused on her behavior, not mine, right?
This is a really good point. I'm not sure how to quantify this, but the meme-ification, so to speak, of bad behavior as a way to normalize it is definitely problematic and seems uniquely internet.
It's the idea that surfacing someone else's bad behavior earns me a pass for mine.
Definitely part of the insecurity that I was getting at, but I think there are likely some individuals looking to spread their 'message'. MTGOW, redpill, incel, qanon, etc. all come to mind - they have a severely skewed idea of how the world works and they want to spread this information. What better way than a naturally occurring phenomenon which highly aligns with their ideas? It seems less like confirmation bias when you have a whole world of individuals and the law of large numbers working in your favor to surface the worst of the worst.
I know this sounds very high-horse. I promise I'm not trying to come across like that.
Frankly I would never assume that from you, but I have the context of knowing and paying attention to your posts. 😊
What scares me is that I think many people have stopped caring about the harm they might be doing or, even more, feel that the deliberate harm is justified based on who it's aimed at.
I think this is a huge issue with globalization that we still have yet to solve. Even when we think of the industrial revolution, we see companies abusing the nearly endless supply of humans - they become nothing more than faceless workers, their humanity lost in the gigantic machine of labor.
Rather than being lost in a large machine, we're getting lost in the entirety of the world. Feel bad about how you phrased something to someone after the fact? Make yourself feel better by looking at puppies, or reading a story about how someone contributed to a charity or turned someone's life around. There's no accountability, even to yourself, when there's content for any desire or need you have available in an endless supply at your fingertips.
Based on previous stories of difficulties with piercing Wikipedia's entrenched mod community and Wikimedia's infamous light touch approach to corralling some of their more ardent contributors, I...
Based on previous stories of difficulties with piercing Wikipedia's entrenched mod community and Wikimedia's infamous light touch approach to corralling some of their more ardent contributors, I don't think any of your suggestions would have worked, unfortunately. It's not exactly easy to go and talk to anyone at Wikimedia about inaccuracies.
It's like Reddit itself, those in charge have entrenched themselves from accountability so that it takes outside pressure to inspire change.
And you think attacking them publicly won't make that much harder? If so, I highly disagree. They're only likely to be even more defensive.
Based on previous stories of difficulties with piercing Wikipedia's entrenched mod community and Wikimedia's infamous light touch approach to corralling some of their more ardent contributors
And you think attacking them publicly won't make that much harder? If so, I highly disagree. They're only likely to be even more defensive.
I understand you disagree and would prefer that the situation isn't what it is. Is it a bad situation? Yes. And it's a truly terrible situation for that teen. I said in the outset that the blame...
I understand you disagree and would prefer that the situation isn't what it is. Is it a bad situation? Yes. And it's a truly terrible situation for that teen.
I said in the outset that the blame here likes squarely on Wikimedia's shoulders for letting the situation get here as it is no one else's fault but their own thanks to their lax auditing. Them getting defensive over a public callout isn't a reason to not call them out, it's just another log on the fire of "they should have done more" because that is simply not an appropriate attitude for them to take at this point.
Why not? That's their entire model, and one they chose for themselves. They've had over 15 years to adjust it but haven't. Who else would you place at fault for allowing the situation to go so...
Why not? That's their entire model, and one they chose for themselves. They've had over 15 years to adjust it but haven't. Who else would you place at fault for allowing the situation to go so far?
Their current policy is that they "[do] not edit, contribute or determine the content on Wikipedia. Rather, Wikipedia’s volunteer community determines what goes on the site." Clearly this approach is putting other people at risk, as you've indicated. They need a better policy.
Can you propose a better model to harness community volunteer work for the benefit of free information other than what there is in Wikipedia? I can't think of one. Building a closed encyclopedia...
Can you propose a better model to harness community volunteer work for the benefit of free information other than what there is in Wikipedia? I can't think of one.
Building a closed encyclopedia as big as Wikipedia is with a copyleft license would simply not be possible.
Sure, do some basic audits every once in a while. Act on reports from community members who are flagging issues instead of saying "You all decide, we're staying out of it." They should be setting...
Sure, do some basic audits every once in a while. Act on reports from community members who are flagging issues instead of saying "You all decide, we're staying out of it." They should be setting universal standards and then auditing against that.
What kind of response is telling a community to decide among themselves when the complaint is that that particular community is comprised entirely of one person and his bot-net?
Enforcing standards isn't mutually exclusive to building a copyleft encyclopedia.
Unfortunately it will take a large number of Scots speaking volunteers to correct so many articles, so some amount of public attention was necessary for that reason. International attention, no,...
Unfortunately it will take a large number of Scots speaking volunteers to correct so many articles, so some amount of public attention was necessary for that reason. International attention, no, but that doesn't seem to have been the intention of the original post.
Wow, that's so messed up. I've looked at that before out of curiosity assuming that it was valid Scots. This is such United Statesan shit to do. This person's ignorance and the damage they've done...
Wow, that's so messed up. I've looked at that before out of curiosity assuming that it was valid Scots. This is such United Statesan shit to do. This person's ignorance and the damage they've done is incredible. Scots isn't a common language and actual Scots speakers are going to have to spend years salvaging that wiki if they want it back.
I really don't think it's fair to characterize this to Americans in general, and that's a gross misexaggeration of what went on here. The user contributed in good faith (albeit it severely...
This is such United Statesan shit to do. This person's ignorance and the damage they've done is incredible
I really don't think it's fair to characterize this to Americans in general, and that's a gross misexaggeration of what went on here. The user contributed in good faith (albeit it severely misguided) and started when they were 12, so clearly not the best age for decision making, and a badly translated article is better than nothing at all. Worst case, it should be easy for a native speaker to detect where the mistranslations were made and clean them up accordingly - that's what powers Wikipedia after all. And compared to past vandalizations of the wiki, with intentionally false info, profanity, etc. This isn't in the same ballpark.
I think the bigger WTF is that there are apparently so few people reading or writing this wiki that no one was able to realize this apparently broken Scots isn't correct or suggested any improvements for 7 years. I would start asking questions at that point about whether having this wiki is even worth it, if a single American child is doing 1/3 of all the writing in the wiki and no one seemed to feel the need to point out his writing isn't correct. Wikipedia's whole system is built on user feedback and convolutional improvement, and clearly that's not happening here.
I also think we should start some serious introspection here in how this was handled. I want to bonk the person that went straight to reddit with this on the head, and didn't think to handle it discretely. This kid is barely of legal age, and the vast majority of his stuff was written when he was a legal child - it's incredibly poor taste imo to sick the internet mob on him for that.
We're famous for being ignorant about everything that happens outside our borders. This person had no idea what Scots actually is and spent a decade without learning at any point that their...
I really don't think it's fair to characterize this to Americans in general, and that's a gross misexaggeration of what went on here. The user contributed in good faith (albeit it severely misguided) and started when they were 12, so clearly not the best age for decision making, and a badly translated article is better than nothing at all. Worst case, it should be easy for a native speaker to detect where the mistranslations were made and clean them up accordingly - that's what powers Wikipedia after all. And compared to past vandalizations of the wiki, with intentionally false info, profanity, etc. This isn't in the same ballpark.
We're famous for being ignorant about everything that happens outside our borders. This person had no idea what Scots actually is and spent a decade without learning at any point that their understanding of it was completely wrong. Ignorance and damage don't take malice, and I should have hedged my language a bit better in my original post. I don't think this person was malicious but they were incredibly ignorant and damaged people's perception of the Scots language, as well as maybe people's knowledge of it since that wiki is probably one of the biggest sources of literature in the language on the internet.
I don't think a native speaker can just clean up the mistranslations, my understanding is that they just compared English words to their Scots counterparts with no context. It would be like si yo poner cada palabra dentro Google Translate y esperada lo a hacer sentido. I think whoever rewrites the articles is going to take longer to do it than the author did making them.
I think the bigger WTF is that there are apparently so few people reading or writing this wiki that no one was able to realize this apparently broken Scots isn't correct or suggested any improvements for 7 years. I would start asking questions at that point about whether having this wiki is even worth it, if a single American child is doing 1/3 of all the writing in the wiki and no one seemed to feel the need to point out his writing isn't correct. Wikipedia's whole system is built on user feedback and convolutional improvement, and clearly that's not happening here.
I agree completely, there was some massive negligence going on here. As I said in another comment, someone should have seen what they were doing, pointed them toward a resource to learn Scots, and then let them create articles once they had some understanding of it.
I also think we should start some serious introspection here in how this was handled. I want to bonk the person that went straight to reddit with this on the head, and didn't think to handle it discretely. This kid is barely of legal age, and the vast majority of his stuff was written when he was a legal child - it's incredibly poor taste imo to sick the internet mob on him for that.
The top-level comment below mine is doing that. The person should have gone to Wikipedia instead of Reddit, although someone else brings up that Wikipedia's editors and administrators tend to be kind of controlling and may not have been very receptive to one of their own being told they need to fix their articles. That said, they should have at least tried solving it through Wikipedia first. I don't think this person should have been harassed for what they've done at all. One of my friends linked me to a subredditDrama post about it and it disgusted me. I've always hated that subreddit for making light of things that are often serious to the subjects. Taking pleasure in other people's drama is one of the lowest things you can do in my book.
The reddit thread mentions that the guy probably has a mental disorder and he believes he is helping the community. This looks like too much effort for simple vandalism. A similar...ish issue...
The reddit thread mentions that the guy probably has a mental disorder and he believes he is helping the community. This looks like too much effort for simple vandalism.
Certainly. I don't treat it as vandalism and it's not malicious in the same way that lady wasn't being malicious, but it's doing damage to perception of the language and will mislead anyone trying...
Certainly. I don't treat it as vandalism and it's not malicious in the same way that lady wasn't being malicious, but it's doing damage to perception of the language and will mislead anyone trying to learn more about it. They've spent years on tens of thousands of articles (a substantial portion of the entire wiki) and it's going to have to either all be nuked or replaced, which will take way longer to do than it did for the person to create the articles. I say that it's United Statesan shit to do because we're famous for being ignorant about everything outside our borders.
As someone brought up in the Reddit thread, it's also an indictment on Wikipedia as a whole. Not a lot, but still. Someone was negligent and gave this person administrator powers over the wiki even though they have no knowledge of the language, and they were allowed to write and edit articles for years seemingly unchecked until today. Managing volunteer effort is probably complicated, I agree. This person has a genuine desire to help and as soon as it was apparently they didn't know Scots, they should have been pointed toward a resource for learning it and then allowed to contribute once they actually knew what they were doing and weren't just changing the spelling of occasional words.
Sidenote: the Fresco restoration was not just fun, it was insanely interesting from an art perspective based on how someone who had seen this image over and over her entire life and cared for it...
Sidenote: the Fresco restoration was not just fun, it was insanely interesting from an art perspective based on how someone who had seen this image over and over her entire life and cared for it actually saw the image of christ. The Neo-Platonian focus on the deep mysterious eyes, the erotic focus on the lips and the vagueness of everything else is just fascinating in itself.
Just thinking about the times she has seen the images, and what it is she saw is beyond interesting for me. How she added shit not really there because she obviously never cared enough to remember them (the scroll roll at the bottom for example). Some parts are fuzzy perhaps because she didn't know how to technically render them but the eyes... the eyes really is the clincher.
The original artwork was basically pointless, the new one is artistically relevant for its glimpse in to a devoted elderly catholics view of the original.
EDIT: I have goosebumps thinking about it right now :D
This feels like the most extreme case of the maxim that 'most of what you read on the internet is written by insane people'. Honestly, more than anything else I find this quite sad. I imagine it...
Honestly, more than anything else I find this quite sad. I imagine it will be very painful for this individual when their enormous body of work gets summarily nuked.
I think it is perhaps a sign that Wikipedia possibly need a higher bar of entry for niche languages, especially ones like this where it's not as if it's bringing the encyclopaedia to anyone who couldn't understand it in any other language. I think StackExchange has beta system whereby a community is kept on a sort of probation until it meets certain criteria - I think that would be an appropriate tack for Wikipedia as well.
I can't see any safeguard against this sort of thing except for more active moderation, which can be difficult with minority languages. Countries often fund organisation to preserve minority...
I can't see any safeguard against this sort of thing except for more active moderation, which can be difficult with minority languages. Countries often fund organisation to preserve minority languages, maybe there's a UK government funded department that could hire a native speaker to moderate the Scots wikipedia and ensure cerain quality standards. Otherwise the harm done online could eclipse the good they do elsewhere.
I wonder how well a layer of verification would be. Articles continue to get written and edited as they are now, but show an "unreviewed" badge. Then a user (or N users) with verified...
I wonder how well a layer of verification would be. Articles continue to get written and edited as they are now, but show an "unreviewed" badge. Then a user (or N users) with verified qualifications (like expert flair on some technical or academic subreddits) can review it and it'll either show "[verified | failed verification] by on X by Y (qualificationZ), .... There have been N more recent edits". I think Healthline.com does something similar, where articles say who wrote them and when, and separately who fact checked or medically reviewed, their title (MD, RN, etc.) and when.
Managing the user verification process at that scale would be a tough problem though.
I came across this story on Twitter with folks using it as an example of needing to be careful and vet where your data comes from - apparently some number of folks were using the Wiki in things...
I came across this story on Twitter with folks using it as an example of needing to be careful and vet where your data comes from - apparently some number of folks were using the Wiki in things like AI training data assuming it was valid Scots.
I definitely don't agree with harassing the teen who wrote these articles, but I understand the anger of the Scottish folks (speakers or not). The initial response from people who edit Wikipedia, whether they were involved in this particular project or not, seemed to be: "Wikis are public and iterative; if you think it's wrong you can fix it. No one who speaks Scots seemed interested in helping" - which sort of rubbed me the wrong way. It's basically blaming speakers of a minority language for there not being enough speakers to grow a Wiki, and it ignores the damage easily-found fake Scots does to the preservation of the language.
It does look like the Scots Language Center is starting a project to Rewrite the Wiki, which is good.
Maybe I'm too empathic but reading the last statement they left on their discussion page is just soul-crushing to me and honestly, it makes quite sad that people seem to assume malice and go harass him.. I think making a public post about it in the way it was done was a grave mistake.
No I think that's very appropriate. It seems rare on the internet to come across something that is simultaneously both such an obvious work of passion with only the best of intentions, and also such a huge mistake with some far reaching implications.
This person put in years and years of effort doing something they believed was right. That in itself deserves respect. There's tremendous opportunity here to help steer this person in a good direction, there's no need for punishment. The horrifying realization that they're probably undergoing right now is more than enough.
Were there other options? Wikipedia is unfortunately a black hole if you, an outsider (i.e. not a mod, editor, or administrator), try to report something is wrong, especially given the scale of what was happening here.
If anything, the onus is on Wikimedia for even letting it get so far. It's wild that nobody there realized that an administrator of one of their alternative language sites obviously didn't even speak that language. I don't speak Scots but I could tell at a glance that it was very wrong.
I think creating an RFC would've been good enough. It would've atleast made the conversation not thrown into mainstream. Heck, talking to another admin or anyone at wikimedia or even the user themselves. From the post, it seems they have done none of that and just went straight to Reddit to make a hit piece on the user and Wikipedia itself. I think that's inexcusably the worst option that could've been taken. I can't think of something worse. Please do not encourage this type of behaviour.
As of whether they should be admin, I think the answer is obviously no since they can't do that job effectively. However, seeing as this is the case, it simply goes to show that no one else was willing to put the time into it because I have no doubt that someone who knows Scot could do a better job given the will to do so. I have to respect them for at the very least trying even if it created this whole mess.
I agree that this wasn't handled well overall, but I think it's worth mentioning that a lot of the fault doesn't really come directly from the person that originally made the post, but from other people that amplified that post in more prominent (and far less relevant) contexts.
They made the post in /r/Scotland, which is a relatively small subreddit that wouldn't normally have many non-Scottish viewers. Then other people took the post and started spreading it to larger subreddits, Twitter, Hacker News, here, etc. And they generally weren't spreading it because it was important information for the outside world—I guarantee that almost everyone that read about this (and often, spread it further) didn't even know a Scots version of Wikipedia existed, and really doesn't care about it at all. A lot of them are just looking for a reason to be smug towards WIkipedia, the user, or various other "targets".
The main issue is really that internet platforms and culture have gotten to a point where this kind of mocking and harassment is normal and even encouraged. Thousands of people end up practically competing to make the most biting comment towards the situation and people involved, and of course that feels very much like harassment to the targets. Some people surely crossed the line into actual, direct harassment.
I think it's likely that the original post's author had no idea that this would end up getting so much attention, and didn't consider these kind of second-degree negative effects. They've added this edit to the top of their post now:
This is the dark side of 'cancel culture' although I worry about using that terminology at all, because what happened here is in my view not analogous to most of what is described as such.
I saw this pop up in my social media feeds through a variety of lenses, and one thing that stuck out to me in particular was how the social media outlet really lent itself to the discussion. On Tildes, for example, we have a highly upvoted plea to remember the human. I absolutely love that about this community and want to take a second to thank you, Deimos, for all the work you've put in to helping to create and culture that community.
However, contrast that to reddit and twitter, where the majority of comments and posts are vilifying the user and playing into the fear and damage that this has caused. This is much more reminiscent of mainstream media, which surely will pick up on this eventually and unfortunately vilify this teenager in a similar fashion.
I also saw this pop up in general discussions on discord and slack channels I'm a part of where the conversation was reasonably split. Some users were attacking, others defending. I'm quite glad the communities I've chosen to be a part of have users on both sides and not just users on both sides, but people willing to listen to each other and take both the good and the bad away from this because I do believe that we need to consider the far reaching implications of something like this happening (so that we can help to prevent it in the future) without abandoning the person at the heart of this matter and continuing to be compassionate towards the extreme hate they are likely experiencing right now.
I don't really know how to articulate it either ("cancel culture" isn't the right term), but there's something deeply wrong with our internet. It's something along the lines of the idea that everybody is looking down at others for sport. There's a sort of sentiment of supremacy behind it, where everybody is eager for chances to smugly dunk on someone else, or just cheer on someone else's dunk. It's not limited to any one thing, topic, or ideology, either. The nature and target of the dunk is based on the community it's occurring in, and it can come in any flavor.
It's hard to even talk about because addressing it looks like I'm guilty of the same thing I'm addressing (dunking on other social media sites! dunking on those people!), but I promise this isn't a hot take or a way to make myself feel better than someone else. It comes from a place of genuine concern, because the sentiment is seemingly inescapable, and the scale at which it's enabled to happen is staggering. One bad tweet can pull focus for millions of individual and generate tens of thousands of dunks, and this happens in parallel, all the time, constantly. In fact, much of the internet is seemingly designed around digging up the worst examples from targets for the purposes of easy dunks.
I mean at it's root is a deep insecurity. With the world becoming increasingly more visible (and visible in highly skewed ways) its not really that surprising that people are feeling more and more insecure - after all, you're not the one posting bathing suit selfies on a yacht with celebrities, but you're probably surrounded by posts of this nature. We're simultaneously presented with a life that is not accessible to us in both directions from our current state. People are posting the highlights of their life on social media and sources of news are highlighting the absolute lows that humans are capable of. It's no wonder people are insecure and anxious about it, fighting to restore some semblance of normalcy or assure themselves that things aren't really all that bad, I mean, look at this terrible person, at least I'm not them!
Is this really any different than how 'gossip' used to be spread? While I believe the internet has amplified some of the worst human qualities, I think at the heart of the issue is insecure people who aren't experiencing enough love in their lives. If only we could find smarter and better ways to harness the internet to spread love and acceptance instead of smugness, vitriol, and hate.
This seems to vary greatly from social circle to social circle, even on the internet. Tildes is a good example of a very different and unique kind of social interaction. I also notice a drastically different kind of conversation (and support) among the EDM community. It's stark to see the difference in chat on the music channels I follow and on the rest of twitch. I wonder if there isn't a way to better harness good intentions and positive vibes more broadly on the internet than through grass roots. Can this be incentivized? I don't know, but I'm hopeful.
So, when I was growing up, adults would always say "bullies are just insecure" as a way of making me feel better, and it rang hollow to little bullied me, and as an adult who now works with children, it still rings a little hollow. It's certainly true for some, but for others bullying just seems more a way to enjoy cruelty. While I think you're right in that some of what we see does come from insecurity, I think some of it genuinely is just cruelty for the sake of it -- because it feels good.
In typing this out now I realize that there's another piece here that bothers me: it's not just about dunks, it's also about finding reasons or permission to be cruel. For example, let's say I want to hate on women. If I just come right out and do that I'll likely be shut down (and rightfully so). However, if I instead find an example of a "Karen", then I can go off on her, call her every name in the book, and make all sorts of misogynistic comments about women by proxy of her. Not only that, but I can also be celebrated for all of this, and, probably most importantly, feel downright justified in doing this! Because it's about a "Karen" who clearly deserves it, right? Because we're focused on her behavior, not mine, right?
It's the idea that surfacing someone else's bad behavior earns me a pass for mine. Whenever someone does something shitty, I can use their shittiness to effectively get away with abusive speech, stereotyping, name-calling, body shaming, etc. I say "get away with" which makes it sound like this is a conscious thing, but I think what worries me most is that many wouldn't identify it that way. In fact, I think they would see their cruelty as righteous or just, couched in a larger culture war, and prompted by their target's behavior.
The internet seems to engage in a relentless and constant pursuit of "justified cruelty". As such, it sometimes feels like one big refrain of "but they started it!" from every possible corner. It feels like so many people are either on the hunt for, or simply happy to encounter, "fair game" -- targets that trigger their worst behaviors, all while giving them an intellectual and social permission to do so.
I know this sounds very high-horse. I promise I'm not trying to come across like that. I will readily admit to being susceptible to these forces myself. I've deleted comments here on Tildes that I've written from places of anger, where the wrath I lobbed against my target felt justified to me. Back when I was on reddit I used to love shutting people down. One of my top comments of all time was a sassy, flippant dismissal of someone acting in good faith, and the response it got from the wider community felt so good at the time that it took me way too long to realize that I'd probably done genuine harm to the individual I'd responded to. I'm not immune to these forces and feelings. I don't think anyone is.
What scares me is that I think many people have stopped caring about the harm they might be doing or, even more, feel that the deliberate harm is justified based on who it's aimed at.
Their insecurity certainly doesn't stop the bullying from happening. It's not a great way to soothe someone who has been bullied, either. As you point this out, while I realize I'm trying to explain the 'why', it doesn't really solve anything to know why - it might help us to target resources to help people out, but knowing the reasoning behind someone being shitty doesn't change what they're doing or really provide any direct action. There's a million ways they might be insecure, and there's a million ways they should know better than to take it out on others.
This is the heart of what I'm trying to get at. Why does it feel good for them? I think it feels good for them because they are insecure about what control they have over their lives. They are insecure about the kind of people they are, and are desperately looking to shift some of that blame off themselves and onto others.
At least, I desperately hope so because I've seen myself doing similar behavior as a child and I feel it was rooted in my own insecurities and lack of education and empathy. I was able to escape it, and the thought that they might not is deeply unsettling and frightful. I don't want to live in a world where this is an inescapable reality for most humans.
This is a really good point. I'm not sure how to quantify this, but the meme-ification, so to speak, of bad behavior as a way to normalize it is definitely problematic and seems uniquely internet.
Definitely part of the insecurity that I was getting at, but I think there are likely some individuals looking to spread their 'message'. MTGOW, redpill, incel, qanon, etc. all come to mind - they have a severely skewed idea of how the world works and they want to spread this information. What better way than a naturally occurring phenomenon which highly aligns with their ideas? It seems less like confirmation bias when you have a whole world of individuals and the law of large numbers working in your favor to surface the worst of the worst.
Frankly I would never assume that from you, but I have the context of knowing and paying attention to your posts. 😊
I think this is a huge issue with globalization that we still have yet to solve. Even when we think of the industrial revolution, we see companies abusing the nearly endless supply of humans - they become nothing more than faceless workers, their humanity lost in the gigantic machine of labor.
Rather than being lost in a large machine, we're getting lost in the entirety of the world. Feel bad about how you phrased something to someone after the fact? Make yourself feel better by looking at puppies, or reading a story about how someone contributed to a charity or turned someone's life around. There's no accountability, even to yourself, when there's content for any desire or need you have available in an endless supply at your fingertips.
Based on previous stories of difficulties with piercing Wikipedia's entrenched mod community and Wikimedia's infamous light touch approach to corralling some of their more ardent contributors, I don't think any of your suggestions would have worked, unfortunately. It's not exactly easy to go and talk to anyone at Wikimedia about inaccuracies.
It's like Reddit itself, those in charge have entrenched themselves from accountability so that it takes outside pressure to inspire change.
And you think attacking them publicly won't make that much harder? If so, I highly disagree. They're only likely to be even more defensive.
I understand you disagree and would prefer that the situation isn't what it is. Is it a bad situation? Yes. And it's a truly terrible situation for that teen.
I said in the outset that the blame here likes squarely on Wikimedia's shoulders for letting the situation get here as it is no one else's fault but their own thanks to their lax auditing. Them getting defensive over a public callout isn't a reason to not call them out, it's just another log on the fire of "they should have done more" because that is simply not an appropriate attitude for them to take at this point.
I think managing the amount of volunteer work that Wikimedia handles must be very hard and I wouldn't put the blame squarely on them for this.
Why not? That's their entire model, and one they chose for themselves. They've had over 15 years to adjust it but haven't. Who else would you place at fault for allowing the situation to go so far?
Their current policy is that they "[do] not edit, contribute or determine the content on Wikipedia. Rather, Wikipedia’s volunteer community determines what goes on the site." Clearly this approach is putting other people at risk, as you've indicated. They need a better policy.
Gizmodo put together quite a good list of recent examples of other times this lax policy from Wikimedia has resulted in adverse effects. The Croation Wikipedia example is particularly damning.
Can you propose a better model to harness community volunteer work for the benefit of free information other than what there is in Wikipedia? I can't think of one.
Building a closed encyclopedia as big as Wikipedia is with a copyleft license would simply not be possible.
Sure, do some basic audits every once in a while. Act on reports from community members who are flagging issues instead of saying "You all decide, we're staying out of it." They should be setting universal standards and then auditing against that.
What kind of response is telling a community to decide among themselves when the complaint is that that particular community is comprised entirely of one person and his bot-net?
Enforcing standards isn't mutually exclusive to building a copyleft encyclopedia.
Unfortunately it will take a large number of Scots speaking volunteers to correct so many articles, so some amount of public attention was necessary for that reason. International attention, no, but that doesn't seem to have been the intention of the original post.
A sad and unusual situation in a lot of ways.
Wow, that's so messed up. I've looked at that before out of curiosity assuming that it was valid Scots. This is such United Statesan shit to do. This person's ignorance and the damage they've done is incredible. Scots isn't a common language and actual Scots speakers are going to have to spend years salvaging that wiki if they want it back.
Edit to tone down the hyperbole a bit
I really don't think it's fair to characterize this to Americans in general, and that's a gross misexaggeration of what went on here. The user contributed in good faith (albeit it severely misguided) and started when they were 12, so clearly not the best age for decision making, and a badly translated article is better than nothing at all. Worst case, it should be easy for a native speaker to detect where the mistranslations were made and clean them up accordingly - that's what powers Wikipedia after all. And compared to past vandalizations of the wiki, with intentionally false info, profanity, etc. This isn't in the same ballpark.
I think the bigger WTF is that there are apparently so few people reading or writing this wiki that no one was able to realize this apparently broken Scots isn't correct or suggested any improvements for 7 years. I would start asking questions at that point about whether having this wiki is even worth it, if a single American child is doing 1/3 of all the writing in the wiki and no one seemed to feel the need to point out his writing isn't correct. Wikipedia's whole system is built on user feedback and convolutional improvement, and clearly that's not happening here.
I also think we should start some serious introspection here in how this was handled. I want to bonk the person that went straight to reddit with this on the head, and didn't think to handle it discretely. This kid is barely of legal age, and the vast majority of his stuff was written when he was a legal child - it's incredibly poor taste imo to sick the internet mob on him for that.
We're famous for being ignorant about everything that happens outside our borders. This person had no idea what Scots actually is and spent a decade without learning at any point that their understanding of it was completely wrong. Ignorance and damage don't take malice, and I should have hedged my language a bit better in my original post. I don't think this person was malicious but they were incredibly ignorant and damaged people's perception of the Scots language, as well as maybe people's knowledge of it since that wiki is probably one of the biggest sources of literature in the language on the internet.
I don't think a native speaker can just clean up the mistranslations, my understanding is that they just compared English words to their Scots counterparts with no context. It would be like si yo poner cada palabra dentro Google Translate y esperada lo a hacer sentido. I think whoever rewrites the articles is going to take longer to do it than the author did making them.
I agree completely, there was some massive negligence going on here. As I said in another comment, someone should have seen what they were doing, pointed them toward a resource to learn Scots, and then let them create articles once they had some understanding of it.
The top-level comment below mine is doing that. The person should have gone to Wikipedia instead of Reddit, although someone else brings up that Wikipedia's editors and administrators tend to be kind of controlling and may not have been very receptive to one of their own being told they need to fix their articles. That said, they should have at least tried solving it through Wikipedia first. I don't think this person should have been harassed for what they've done at all. One of my friends linked me to a subredditDrama post about it and it disgusted me. I've always hated that subreddit for making light of things that are often serious to the subjects. Taking pleasure in other people's drama is one of the lowest things you can do in my book.
His talk page indicates some people did realise
https://sco.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uiser_collogue:AmaryllisGardener#Translation
The reddit thread mentions that the guy probably has a mental disorder and he believes he is helping the community. This looks like too much effort for simple vandalism.
A similar...ish issue happened in Spain where an elderly woman restored/destroyed a fresco in her church. (more info: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ecce_Homo_(Mart%C3%ADnez_and_Gim%C3%A9nez,_Borja) ). It wasn't an important church or a really old fresco so people mostly though it was funny.
Managing volunteer effort is probably very complicated.
Certainly. I don't treat it as vandalism and it's not malicious in the same way that lady wasn't being malicious, but it's doing damage to perception of the language and will mislead anyone trying to learn more about it. They've spent years on tens of thousands of articles (a substantial portion of the entire wiki) and it's going to have to either all be nuked or replaced, which will take way longer to do than it did for the person to create the articles. I say that it's United Statesan shit to do because we're famous for being ignorant about everything outside our borders.
As someone brought up in the Reddit thread, it's also an indictment on Wikipedia as a whole. Not a lot, but still. Someone was negligent and gave this person administrator powers over the wiki even though they have no knowledge of the language, and they were allowed to write and edit articles for years seemingly unchecked until today. Managing volunteer effort is probably complicated, I agree. This person has a genuine desire to help and as soon as it was apparently they didn't know Scots, they should have been pointed toward a resource for learning it and then allowed to contribute once they actually knew what they were doing and weren't just changing the spelling of occasional words.
Sidenote: the Fresco restoration was not just fun, it was insanely interesting from an art perspective based on how someone who had seen this image over and over her entire life and cared for it actually saw the image of christ. The Neo-Platonian focus on the deep mysterious eyes, the erotic focus on the lips and the vagueness of everything else is just fascinating in itself.
Just thinking about the times she has seen the images, and what it is she saw is beyond interesting for me. How she added shit not really there because she obviously never cared enough to remember them (the scroll roll at the bottom for example). Some parts are fuzzy perhaps because she didn't know how to technically render them but the eyes... the eyes really is the clincher.
The original artwork was basically pointless, the new one is artistically relevant for its glimpse in to a devoted elderly catholics view of the original.
EDIT: I have goosebumps thinking about it right now :D
This feels like the most extreme case of the maxim that 'most of what you read on the internet is written by insane people'.
Honestly, more than anything else I find this quite sad. I imagine it will be very painful for this individual when their enormous body of work gets summarily nuked.
I think it is perhaps a sign that Wikipedia possibly need a higher bar of entry for niche languages, especially ones like this where it's not as if it's bringing the encyclopaedia to anyone who couldn't understand it in any other language. I think StackExchange has beta system whereby a community is kept on a sort of probation until it meets certain criteria - I think that would be an appropriate tack for Wikipedia as well.
I can't see any safeguard against this sort of thing except for more active moderation, which can be difficult with minority languages. Countries often fund organisation to preserve minority languages, maybe there's a UK government funded department that could hire a native speaker to moderate the Scots wikipedia and ensure cerain quality standards. Otherwise the harm done online could eclipse the good they do elsewhere.
I wonder how well a layer of verification would be. Articles continue to get written and edited as they are now, but show an "unreviewed" badge. Then a user (or N users) with verified qualifications (like expert flair on some technical or academic subreddits) can review it and it'll either show "[verified | failed verification] by on X by Y (qualificationZ), .... There have been N more recent edits". I think Healthline.com does something similar, where articles say who wrote them and when, and separately who fact checked or medically reviewed, their title (MD, RN, etc.) and when.
Managing the user verification process at that scale would be a tough problem though.
I came across this story on Twitter with folks using it as an example of needing to be careful and vet where your data comes from - apparently some number of folks were using the Wiki in things like AI training data assuming it was valid Scots.
I definitely don't agree with harassing the teen who wrote these articles, but I understand the anger of the Scottish folks (speakers or not). The initial response from people who edit Wikipedia, whether they were involved in this particular project or not, seemed to be: "Wikis are public and iterative; if you think it's wrong you can fix it. No one who speaks Scots seemed interested in helping" - which sort of rubbed me the wrong way. It's basically blaming speakers of a minority language for there not being enough speakers to grow a Wiki, and it ignores the damage easily-found fake Scots does to the preservation of the language.
It does look like the Scots Language Center is starting a project to Rewrite the Wiki, which is good.