#Most of Scottish Wikipedia written by American using fake ‘accent’

Much of the Scottish-language version of Wikipedia is actually written by an American who doesn’t even speak the language — resulting in comically-bad entries that read like they came from Groundskeeper Willie on “The Simpsons,” according to a new report.

The North Carolina-based user, who goes by the handle AmaryllisGardener, has composed more than 23,000 articles and done at least 200,000 edits on the Scots Wikipedia using bogus phrases meant to sound Scottish, according to Vice.

In a description of the movie “Million Dollar Baby,” for example, the user writes “This film is aboot an unnerappreciatit boxin trainer” and in an entry about the Human Development Index, the person writes it’s “a composite statistic o life expectancy.”

The language is repeated in thousands of articles because the person is an administrator on the site — and ultimately has control over what stays on it, the outlet reported.

“I find it insulting that you would pass this off as our native language which you clearly don’t speak,” a Reddit user, who goes by the handle u/Ultach, wrote after discovering the absurd situation.

“As a native Scot and native speaker, no one where uses this site as it isn’t close to resembling any Scots language. The language you use here is English with some changes in spelling and passing it off as the real deal harms the already derogatory view of Scots languages,” the Reddit user wrote.

Some critics say the entire site should be closed or that Amaryllis’ content — including six years’ worth of entries between 2012 and 2018 — should be scrubbed.

But Amaryllis’ influence over the online encyclopedia is so vast that users must choose between losing much of the site, or simply keeping the misspelled entries, Vice reported.

Another moderator, known as MJL, noted that if Scots Wikipedia was closed, “it will never be reopened.”

The bizarre case shines a spotlight on a big problem for Wikipedia: Many languages have only a few editors, meaning those editors have too much control over what actually ends up on the website.

“The problem is that this person cannot speak Scots,” u/Ultach wrote. “There is almost no difference from standard English and very few Scots words and forms are employed. What they seem to have done is write out the article out in English, then look up each word individually using the Online Scots Dictionary.”

There’s no sign that Amaryllis, a self-proclaimed Christian INTP “furry,” was trying to sabotage the website, the outlet reported, which couldn’t reach the user for comment.

“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,” Amaryllis wrote on in one of his pages.