AmaryllisGardener and Scots Wikipedia

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AmaryllisGardener and Scots Wikipedia

Post by ericbarbour » Wed Aug 26, 2020 5:29 am

If anyone remembers minor language Wikipedias being controlled by ADHD nerds who may or may not know the actual damn language, you may recall "Node ue" and his attempt to create/control a Moldovan language WP (and his pathetic failure). Plus there are occasional messes made by cranks like "Seb az 86556", who practically pwns the Navajo-language Wikipedia (at least he knows some of the actual language) plus raises hell on other WMF projects. It is a common story in Wikiworld.

Today I ran across one I did NOT know about. Thanks to a Facebook post, of all things, that referred back to Twitter and thence to a Reddit thread.
scotswp-fromFB.jpg
scotswp-fromFB.jpg (53.58 KiB) Viewed 5483 times
The Reddit thread, from which his username was censored. He used to claim to be a brony and to have a typical Myers-Briggs score for Wikinerditry, INTP. Good luck finding any evidence of this on a WMF server.
https://www.reddit.com/r/Scotland/comme ... e_article/
The problem is that this person cannot speak Scots. I don’t mean this in a mean spirited or gatekeeping way where they’re trying their best but are making a few mistakes, I mean they don’t seem to have any knowledge of the language at all. They misuse common elements of Scots that are even regularly found in Scots English like “syne” and “an aw”, they invent words which look like phonetically written English words spoken in a Scottish accent like “knaw” (an actual Middle Scots word to be fair, thanks u/lauchteuch9) instead of “ken”, “saive” instead of “hain” and “moost” instead of “maun”, sometimes they just sometimes leave entire English phrases and sentences in the articles without even making an attempt at Scottifying them, nevermind using the appropriate Scots words. Scots words that aren’t also found in an alternate form in English are barely ever used, and never used correctly. Scots grammar is simply not used, there are only Scots words inserted at random into English sentences.
The lunatic's main account, which has admin rights on Scots WP and on Wikidata (don't ask me why):
https://sco.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uiser:AmaryllisGardener
He has only been on any WPs since 2012. Yet he's managed some admin and rollback rights, despite not knowing what the fuck he is doing. His sco-WP talkpage is full of screaming and Wiki-lawyering. A sure sign we have a "Bad Insider" who is asskissing on IRC or in PMs.

Excellent proof that Wikimedia Land is not a happy place, just a very dysfunctional little septic tank.

Amuse yourself and try to dox him.

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Re: AmaryllisGardener and Scots Wikipedia

Post by ericbarbour » Wed Aug 26, 2020 5:54 am

Well, our little fiend Justin "Koavf" Knapp posted a thread on the Meta noticeboard asking why this is happening. And getting some support for "nuking" the Scots Wikipedia. Ha ha ha.

https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimed ... n_in_Scots

Which led to an RFC, in which the Gardener ADMITS he is a screw-up.

https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Request ... eled_scale

In 2008 the Signpost described Scots WP as an "embarrassing parody". No change there!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia ... n_the_news

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Re: AmaryllisGardener and Scots Wikipedia

Post by ericbarbour » Wed Aug 26, 2020 6:32 am

AND IT MADE THE REGISTER:

https://www.theregister.com/2020/08/26/ ... edia_fake/

Which refers to a 2014 Slate article that skipped around the main issue.....

It also made Gizmodo

https://gizmodo.com/alleged-teen-brony- ... 1844845086

There will be more......

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Reminder: Always archive | 50000 Articles – 1 User…

Post by CMAwatch » Wed Aug 26, 2020 8:57 am

Thanks for sharing. This is insane.

What on earth motivated them to write over 50000 articles?

Reminder to anyone: Always archive those links with Archive.Today and Wayback Machine.
#BbbGate
Weaponizing WP:G5
Oops! Didn't think we'd see? It's right there on WikipediaSucks.co!
ericbarbour wrote:
Wed Sep 09, 2020 4:22 am
[Wikipedia is] a stupid video game, and the "encyclopedia" is an accidental byproduct.

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Re: AmaryllisGardener and Scots Wikipedia

Post by ericbarbour » Wed Aug 26, 2020 7:58 pm

The Idiot Blogosphere and the "actual media" have noticed this shitshow. FINALLY.

https://www.thenational.scot/news/18678 ... wikipedia/
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/202 ... -wikipedia
https://www.verdict.co.uk/scots-wikipedia-gibberish/
https://www.themarysue.com/one-american ... wikipedia/
https://www.opindia.com/2020/08/most-ar ... eak-scots/
https://inews.co.uk/news/scotland/scots ... kes-610689

YOU KNOW IT'S SHIT WHEN VICE REPORTS ON IT.....
https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/wxqy ... ed-english

Seriously: people thought the Quorty debacle was a "major scandal". But Quorty didn't try to destroy an actual language, using Wikipedia as a carrier virus. As you well know, people writing AI software for translation and other purposes often scrape Wikimedia databases. This is how the IBM "Watson" project obtained much of its natural-language database. (Watson was a very costly flop. But one of the IBM employees who worked on it, Karen Ingraffea, ended up becoming a powerful admin on en-WP, and thence a WMF employee. In "Trust And Safety". Ha ha.)

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Re: AmaryllisGardener and Scots Wikipedia

Post by ericbarbour » Wed Aug 26, 2020 9:33 pm

This cute little pink box is now being stuck all over sco-WP. As if it "fixes" anything.
Screenshot_2020-08-26 Wikipedia.png
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Re: AmaryllisGardener and Scots Wikipedia

Post by Strelnikov » Thu Aug 27, 2020 5:09 am

The kid was also on the iu.Wikipedia (proof), which is the one written in Inuktitut, a key language of the Candian Inuit people. I don't think he got too far, probably because the script is completely different from English.
Still "Globally Banned" on Wikipedia for the high crime of journalism.

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Re: AmaryllisGardener and Scots Wikipedia

Post by ericbarbour » Fri Aug 28, 2020 8:53 pm

Don't be too surprised if you find "AmaryllisGardener" userpages on hundreds of WMF wikis. It's now routine for damaged people to carpet-bomb everything "just in case". I suspect you could develop an "obsession score" for WP editors based on how many wikis they have accounts on--whether they know the damn language or not. High score usually means a bad editor, odd how that works....

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Re: AmaryllisGardener and Scots Wikipedia

Post by ericbarbour » Tue Sep 15, 2020 8:58 am

Let's check in on sco.WP, shall we?

It appears that AmaryllisGardener has not been back since August 31st. Just hiding out (but retaining his miserable admin rights). The few other regulars are still grinding minor edits but I don't see a concerted effort to fix anything AG did.

And I have real doubts about another administrator, MJL. Nothing but a robotic gnome.

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Re: AmaryllisGardener and Scots Wikipedia

Post by ericbarbour » Mon May 15, 2023 11:20 pm

A brief followup, almost 3 years later.

MJL disappeared in 2022.

AmaryllisGardener waited for the media stink to blow over. Retained his adminship on sco-WP, and partly because he's an admin on Wikidata, he survived the rage explosion in 2020. But he also gave up on sco in 2022. Did very little after the scandal anyway.

https://xtools.wmcloud.org/ec/sco.wikip ... isGardener

Not that it ultimately matters; sco-wiki is a drifting wreck. Edits, by ANYONE, are very rare now.

https://sco.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special: ... lversion=2

The "Admeenistrators' Noticebuird" has a couple of old squabbles, one about the 2020 ban of James Salsman (he ALSO is not proficient in Scots), and one about "Nobility Tom" also grinding content; who also wasn't proficient. Also near-death.

All three of the surviving administrators have given up.
https://sco.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedi ... nistrators

That's how you kill an official WMF project.

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