The spirit of Tony Hancock lives on

TV, Web 1 Minute

This is too wonderful for words. It turns out that almost all 57,000 articles in the Scots language version of Wikipedia were written, edited or overseen by a single person. Who doesn’t speak Scots.

That’s right, someone doing a bad impression of a Scottish accent and then writing it down phonetically is the chief maintainer of the online encyclopedia’s Scots edition. And although this has been carrying on for the best part of a decade, the world was mostly oblivious to it all – until today, when one Redditor finally had enough of reading terrible Scots and decided to look behind the curtain.

Emphasis mine.

My first thought when I read this was of Tony Hancock and, since everything is on YouTube these days, here is the scene I thought of:

It’s not clear whether the Wikipedian has spent the past near-decade creating thousands of fake posts as some kind of incredible practical joke, or that they honestly felt they were doing a good job. There have been occasional interactions with real Scottish folk taking exception to pages, and the administrator has responded in a dead-pan fashion.

I do hope that this is a joke — for the sake of the Wikipedian in question — because if he really is a latter-day Hancock then this is a screw-up of epic proportions.

Published by Paul

Reader of books, watcher of films, player of games. British father of three, now living in Belgium and making a living from building interfaces.

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13 thoughts on “The spirit of Tony Hancock lives on”

    1. I’ve seen elsewhere that Wikipedia now makes it difficult for anyone whose not already established to submit new contributions. I did look at it a while ago and decided not to bother.

      In this case it looks like the Wikipedia collective have left it alone because they simply don’t understand just how bad a mangling of the language the Scots version has managed.

      Liked by 2 people

          4. Apparently it is. The person who uncovered it noted that it looks like the Wikipedian is question simply copied each article from the English version and then did a find and replace using a Scots dictionary — often getting the words wrong.

            Liked by 1 person

    1. In general, I do think Wikipedia (not the Scots version) can be quite useful, but it isn’t an alternative to actually understanding a subject, and you do need to check the references at the bottom of the article.

      Nothing is perfect and that applies to Wikipedia as much as anything else.

      Liked by 1 person

  3. I’m no big fan of wikipedia to begin with so this doesn’t surprise me. It can be a useful jumping off point for finding some references to look at but I don’t use it. I do use the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy https://h2g2.com/ sometimes.

    Liked by 1 person

    1. I hadn’t realised Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy was still a thing. I remember it being on the BBC website many years ago, but that was eventually shut down.

      I shall have to go and poke around this one.

      Liked by 1 person

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