Today, residents of Scotland will decide whether their country will remain part of the United Kingdom or head out on its own, after 300 years of British rule. The Wikipedian has no particular opinion on the matter, except a slight bias toward curiosity, so if it does go through, at the very least I will be fascinated. According to the oddsmakers, though, it sounds like “No” might have the edge.
If it does happen, Wikipedia gets to claim that it was on the bandwagon of Scottish exceptionalism well before the vote: since 2005 a separate Scots language edition of Wikipedia has existed. But is Scots really a separate language? Slate’s Jane C. Hu examined the question in a short piece earlier this summer:
Depending on who you ask, Scots is a language, a dialect of English, or slang. It’s a part of the Germanic language family, which also includes modern German, Dutch, and English. Both modern English and Scots descended from Old English in the 1100s, and developed separately for hundreds of years.
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Whether these different versions are considered distinct languages is largely political. Sociolinguist Max Weinreich is credited with popularizing a quote illustrating the blurry line between the two: “a language is a dialect with an army and a navy.”
At least one half-hearted attempt has been made to move for its closure—which more or less happened to the Klingon Wikipedia (!)—but as a movement, Wikipedia is inclusionist at heart. So long as the Scots Wikipedia is taken seriously by someone, the larger Wikipedia community will honor that (though often not without argument).
Still, I’m not especially clear on what is considered acceptable spelling—and the indisputably-English Wikipedia is not much help. Certainly as one who has tried (more than once) to read Irvine Welsh’s Trainspotting, I can confirm that reading phonetic Scots is no easy task. But it also makes the Scots Wikipedia seem—I hope I am not terrible for saying this—rather comical when you read it back to yourself. Among highlights of today’s main page:
- “Thare are several ongangin requests for comment that need yer input tae gain consensus.”
- “The assassination attempt stairtit concern aboot gun control.”
- “Khmer Rouge leaders Nuon Chea an Khieu Samphan are foond guilty o crimes against humanity bi a UN-backed tribunal.”
- “A 6.1-magnitude yirdquauk in Yunnan, Cheenae, kills at least 589 fowk an injures mair nor 2,400 ithers.”
After seeing that the “Did you know?” section of the English Wikipedia’s front page was here rendered as “Did ye ken?”, a colleague said to me this morning: “That’s brilliant.” But is that really something one says about a serious encyclopedia project? Probably not. And I’m quite sure I am not terrible for pointing out that there are usually fewer than fifty edits to the entire Scots Wikipedia on any given weekday.
There is probably something to be said here about how this cocked-eyebrow appraisal of the Scots language’s validity is synecdoche for the larger question of Scottish independence, although I think I will leave that for someone else to articulate.
A unifying theme of The Wikipedian in the first year of its existence — and will be again now that its unscheduled hiatus comes to an end today — has been the lag between the public’s recognition of Wikipedia as an important if imperfect information resource and the public’s understanding of how Wikipedia works.