A US teenager has been caught out changing more than 27,000 Wikipedia articles on the Scots-language version of the site by trying his hand at a Scottish accent.
The bizarre incident has been laid bare in a lengthy post on Reddit, which revealed a 19-year-old tried to replicate the language despite not knowing how to speak or spell it.
Going by the username of AmaryllisGardner on Wikipedia, the teen started when he was just 12 years old and thought it would be funny. He admitted that once he started on his quest to retype a boatload of articles, he found himself unable to stop.
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Since he started, he's managed to change around 49 percent of all articles on the Scots-language Wikipedia. That is incredible.
The scandal was revealed after a Reddit user noticed that the Scottish version of the website had notoriously bad language and did some digging. Lo and behold, he found that nearly half of the edits had been done by a single user.
The user, named Ultach, wrote: "The problem is that this person cannot speak Scots. I don't mean this in a mean spirited or gatekeeping way...I mean they don't seem to have any knowledge of the language at all.
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"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."
He even provided an example and, let's be honest, Mel Gibson could have done a better job. It reads: "Blaise Pascal (19 Juin 1623 - 19 August 1662) wis a French mathematician, pheesicist, inventor, writer an Christian filosofer.
"He wis a child prodigy that wis eddicated bi his faither, a tax collector in Rouen. Pascal's earliest wark wis in the naitural an applee'd sciences whaur he made important contreibutions tae the study o fluids, an clarified the concepts o pressur an vacuum bi generalisin the wark o Evangelista Torricelli."
While some people might think this is hilarious, Ultach says it's far from amusing.
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"This person has possibly done more damage to the Scots language than anyone else in history," they wrote.
After being found out, Wikipedia user AmaryllisGardner apologised and says he doesn't mind if moderators change all the hard work he's done.
"Honestly, I don't mind if you revert all of my edits, delete my articles, and ban me from the wiki for good," he wrote.
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"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.
"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."
Wikipedia has also issued a statement saying it was reviewing the page 'for large scale language inaccuracies'.
Featured Image Credit: PATopics: News
