Wikipedia boy butchers Scots language with years of errors

Wikipedia’s Scots articles are riddled with mistakes thanks to one passionate contributor
Wikipedia’s Scots articles are riddled with mistakes thanks to one passionate contributor
ALAMY

There was a time when rebellious teenagers vandalised bike sheds or got involved in football hooliganism. In the virtual age they are more likely to wreak havoc on the internet.

Such is the case of an American teenager with a fixation on Wikipedia who is accused of causing lasting damage to the Scots language.

Over almost a decade from the age of 12, the boy, who has not been named, created and edited tens of thousands of pages for the Scots version of the online encyclopedia, all of them written in a nonsensical version of the language.

The result is a database of more than 60,000 articles that function as one of the language’s standard works. As one of the few substantial online resources that