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I'm surprised this story didn't mention the scandal with Scots Wikipedia: https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2020/aug/26/shock-an-aw-us-teenager-wrote-huge-sli

by simonw 1y ago

I'm surprised this story didn't mention the scandal with Scots Wikipedia: https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2020/aug/26/shock-an-aw-us-teenager-wrote-huge-slice-of-scots-wikipedia https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2020/aug/26/shock-an-aw-... > an American teenager – who does not speak Scots, the language of Robert Burns – has been revealed as responsible for almost half of the entries on the Scots language version of Wikipedia It wasn't malicious either, it was someone who started editing Wikipedia at 12 and naively failed to recognise the damage they were doing.

fooker 1y ago
[flagged]
- AlienRobot 1y ago
  Yes, half of my entire political ideology is based on posts written by 12 year olds on the Internet. The other half is based on posts written by dogs[1]. 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_the_Internet,_nobody_knows_you%27re_a_dog https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_the_Internet,_nobody_knows_...
  - fooker 1y ago
    Yep, it's either dogs or r̸u̸s̸s̸i̸a̸n̸ chinese bots.
    - aspenmayer 1y ago
      > Yep, it's either dogs or r̸u̸s̸s̸i̸a̸n̸ chinese bots. Please consider users of screen readers and other assistive technologies, as your nonstandard usage of nonstandard characters makes parsing your comment difficult if not impossible. Not a slight or a correction, as I am a fan of Zalgo text myself, but after being informed by others about how inscrutable it can be to the differently abled, I have reconsidered using it.
      - fooker 1y ago
        Didn't realize that, thanks! I wonder if the future of screen reading applications is bypassing these issues + avoiding parsing weird websites by just doing AI driven OCR.
        aspenmayer 1y ago
        I used to use Zalgo text to make it harder to read my name when I use it, as I use my “real name” and didn’t want it to be scraped by bots, but some folks literally blocked me on social media after a bit of a spat that I’ll admit was caused by a misunderstanding on my part. Apparently, these kinds of characters’ interpretations are context-specific, and using them as a person as strike-throughs is readily apparent for some, but while the meaning is possible to be deduced by an AI, it shouldn’t be expected or assumed to be understood. My HN username in Zalgo text was taking over 30 seconds to read all of the diacritics per post on platforms I used it on, so I had to change my ways or admit that I didn’t care about the experience others had, the latter of which couldn’t be further from the truth. AI has a hard time deriving how many r’s are in strawberry, so I won’t expect it to parse my text on behalf of others any time soon, though I don’t think you meant any harm. In the interest of respect for those who don’t have a choice in using tech to help them do what comes easily and naturally to me, I thought I’d pay forward the knowledge of how the world and our perceptions of it is as unique as every individual.
        a2128 1y ago
        TalkBack on Android seems to read it just fine, assumedly without needing any fancy AI or OCR
- add-sub-mul-div 1y ago
  Jfc, not everything is about that.
  - fooker 1y ago
    I meant it as an example of--road to hell paved with good intentions and "and naively failed to recognise the damage they were doing". But you do you.
    - punchfunk4lyte 1y ago
      That's extremely tangential. Bringing hot-button political topics into unrelated threads flattens everything into political arguments and starves all other topics of oxygen.
      - PeterHolzwarth 1y ago
        More specifically, it gets important HN discussions quickly flagged and dropped.
TZubiri 1y ago
The Cebuano wiki is a similar case, not spoken often, but it was a personal project of an editor that was mad at political articles and started making animal articles in the Cebuano wiki. The solution is to differentiate and tag inputs and outputs, such that outputs can't be fed as inputs recursively. Funnily enough, wikipedia's sourcing policy does this perfectly, not only are sources the input and page content is just an output, but page content is a tertiary source, and sources by policy should be secondary (and sometimes primary) sources, so the system is even protected against cross tertiary source pollution (say an encyclopedia feeding off wikipedia and viceversa). It is only when articles posing as secondary sources fail to cite wikipedia that a recursive quality loss can occur, see [[citogenesis]]
- galagawinkle489 1y ago
  Many sources for Wikipedia articles refer to Wikipedia without citing it. Many journalists will work from Wikipedia, and most of Wikipedia's sources are journalistic articles. It happens to be that often this isn't noticed because the information obtained this way is true and uncontroversial. Citogenesis only documents examples where, by bad luck, the result is untrue information.
  - TZubiri 1y ago
    No citogenesis is present regardless of whether the information is "true". The concept of "truth" on wikipedia doesn't have much weight, mainly because it would be impractical, out of scope and original research to determine truthfulness.
- thaumasiotes 1y ago
  > It is only when articles posing as secondary sources fail to cite wikipedia that a recursive quality loss can occur I've seen a college professor cite wikipedia in support of a false claim. On investigation, the text in wikipedia was cited to an earlier blog post by that same professor. I wasn't convinced.
  - TZubiri 1y ago
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
debtta 1y ago
The background here is that Scots is not really a language. Try asking a Glasgow taxi driver who addresses you in 'Scots' whether he knows any English. Robert Burns wrote in English, with some of his spelling reflecting pronunciation in the Scottish English dialect. The people who want it to be considered as a language for political reasons cannot be bothered to translate Wikipedia themselves. They read and edit English Wikipedia and understand it perfectly.
- zozbot234 1y ago
  Scots is somewhat partially intelligible in written form to English speakers, but that does not make it the same language as English. You might as well say that Spanish and Portuguese are the same language.
  - debtta 1y ago
    You might as well say that US English and Canadian English are different languages. Geordie English is closer to Edinburgh 'Scots' than to RP English or US English or Indian English. Is it a dialect of Scots?
    - zozbot234 1y ago
      There's also a smooth language continuum between Spanish and Portuguese, with varieties like Galego. This doesn't make them the same language. Historically the language continuum encompassed most of Europe, but people at the extremes would've had no expectation of understanding each other's language.
- mikemcquaid 1y ago
  Sort of? The Glaswegian taxi driver may not consider themself to be speaking a different language but, if speaking to another local and leaving aside pronunciation, they’d use words, phrases and even grammar that’s incomprehensible to someone with no experience with Scots. I’m a “posh Scot”, raised middle class in Edinburgh so my accent is minimal and thickens up or softens depending on who I’m speaking to. Even for me, there’s a lot of words, phrases and ways of speaking I’ve had to adjust to be consistently understood by American coworkers when over the last 10+ years.

by simonw 1y ago

fooker 1y ago

[flagged]

AlienRobot 1y ago
Yes, half of my entire political ideology is based on posts written by 12 year olds on the Internet. The other half is based on posts written by dogs[1]. 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_the_Internet,_nobody_knows_you%27re_a_dog https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_the_Internet,_nobody_knows_...
- fooker 1y ago
  Yep, it's either dogs or r̸u̸s̸s̸i̸a̸n̸ chinese bots.
  - aspenmayer 1y ago
    > Yep, it's either dogs or r̸u̸s̸s̸i̸a̸n̸ chinese bots. Please consider users of screen readers and other assistive technologies, as your nonstandard usage of nonstandard characters makes parsing your comment difficult if not impossible. Not a slight or a correction, as I am a fan of Zalgo text myself, but after being informed by others about how inscrutable it can be to the differently abled, I have reconsidered using it.
    - fooker 1y ago
      Didn't realize that, thanks! I wonder if the future of screen reading applications is bypassing these issues + avoiding parsing weird websites by just doing AI driven OCR.
      - aspenmayer 1y ago
        I used to use Zalgo text to make it harder to read my name when I use it, as I use my “real name” and didn’t want it to be scraped by bots, but some folks literally blocked me on social media after a bit of a spat that I’ll admit was caused by a misunderstanding on my part. Apparently, these kinds of characters’ interpretations are context-specific, and using them as a person as strike-throughs is readily apparent for some, but while the meaning is possible to be deduced by an AI, it shouldn’t be expected or assumed to be understood. My HN username in Zalgo text was taking over 30 seconds to read all of the diacritics per post on platforms I used it on, so I had to change my ways or admit that I didn’t care about the experience others had, the latter of which couldn’t be further from the truth. AI has a hard time deriving how many r’s are in strawberry, so I won’t expect it to parse my text on behalf of others any time soon, though I don’t think you meant any harm. In the interest of respect for those who don’t have a choice in using tech to help them do what comes easily and naturally to me, I thought I’d pay forward the knowledge of how the world and our perceptions of it is as unique as every individual.
      - a2128 1y ago
        TalkBack on Android seems to read it just fine, assumedly without needing any fancy AI or OCR
add-sub-mul-div 1y ago
Jfc, not everything is about that.
- fooker 1y ago
  I meant it as an example of--road to hell paved with good intentions and "and naively failed to recognise the damage they were doing". But you do you.
  - punchfunk4lyte 1y ago
    That's extremely tangential. Bringing hot-button political topics into unrelated threads flattens everything into political arguments and starves all other topics of oxygen.
    - PeterHolzwarth 1y ago
      More specifically, it gets important HN discussions quickly flagged and dropped.

TZubiri 1y ago

The Cebuano wiki is a similar case, not spoken often, but it was a personal project of an editor that was mad at political articles and started making animal articles in the Cebuano wiki. The solution is to differentiate and tag inputs and outputs, such that outputs can't be fed as inputs recursively. Funnily enough, wikipedia's sourcing policy does this perfectly, not only are sources the input and page content is just an output, but page content is a tertiary source, and sources by policy should be secondary (and sometimes primary) sources, so the system is even protected against cross tertiary source pollution (say an encyclopedia feeding off wikipedia and viceversa). It is only when articles posing as secondary sources fail to cite wikipedia that a recursive quality loss can occur, see [[citogenesis]]

galagawinkle489 1y ago
Many sources for Wikipedia articles refer to Wikipedia without citing it. Many journalists will work from Wikipedia, and most of Wikipedia's sources are journalistic articles. It happens to be that often this isn't noticed because the information obtained this way is true and uncontroversial. Citogenesis only documents examples where, by bad luck, the result is untrue information.
- TZubiri 1y ago
  No citogenesis is present regardless of whether the information is "true". The concept of "truth" on wikipedia doesn't have much weight, mainly because it would be impractical, out of scope and original research to determine truthfulness.
thaumasiotes 1y ago
> It is only when articles posing as secondary sources fail to cite wikipedia that a recursive quality loss can occur I've seen a college professor cite wikipedia in support of a false claim. On investigation, the text in wikipedia was cited to an earlier blog post by that same professor. I wasn't convinced.
- TZubiri 1y ago

deleted 1y ago

[deleted]

debtta 1y ago

The background here is that Scots is not really a language. Try asking a Glasgow taxi driver who addresses you in 'Scots' whether he knows any English. Robert Burns wrote in English, with some of his spelling reflecting pronunciation in the Scottish English dialect. The people who want it to be considered as a language for political reasons cannot be bothered to translate Wikipedia themselves. They read and edit English Wikipedia and understand it perfectly.

zozbot234 1y ago
Scots is somewhat partially intelligible in written form to English speakers, but that does not make it the same language as English. You might as well say that Spanish and Portuguese are the same language.
- debtta 1y ago
  You might as well say that US English and Canadian English are different languages. Geordie English is closer to Edinburgh 'Scots' than to RP English or US English or Indian English. Is it a dialect of Scots?
  - zozbot234 1y ago
    There's also a smooth language continuum between Spanish and Portuguese, with varieties like Galego. This doesn't make them the same language. Historically the language continuum encompassed most of Europe, but people at the extremes would've had no expectation of understanding each other's language.
mikemcquaid 1y ago
Sort of? The Glaswegian taxi driver may not consider themself to be speaking a different language but, if speaking to another local and leaving aside pronunciation, they’d use words, phrases and even grammar that’s incomprehensible to someone with no experience with Scots. I’m a “posh Scot”, raised middle class in Edinburgh so my accent is minimal and thickens up or softens depending on who I’m speaking to. Even for me, there’s a lot of words, phrases and ways of speaking I’ve had to adjust to be consistently understood by American coworkers when over the last 10+ years.