A trip up north to Scotland
As Scotland is deciding its future this week, we thought it might be a good idea to get to know the editors of WikiProject Scotland and talk to them about the project. A moderately-sized WikiProject with around 90 active participants, it covers a huge area ranging around every Scottish town from Coldstream to Brae. It has a number of child projects, including ones for Edinburgh, Clans of Scotland, Medieval Scotland, Scottish Castles, Scottish Islands and Transport in Scotland. According to its assessment department, there are currently 51 pieces of Featured content and 139 Good articles under the project's umbrella. In short, a very successful set-up covering a wonderful country with some of the best scenery in Great Britain. So, it makes great sense to feature them in a WikiProject Report and get the inside story from some Scottish Wikipedians. We interviewed Ben MacDui, Drchriswilliams, Mutt Lunker and Nick.
What was your motivation for joining WikiProject Scotland? Do you, or have you ever lived in Scotland?
- Ben MacDui: Simply that I live in Scotland and enjoy reading and writing about the subject.
- Mutt Lunker: I mainly use Wikipedia to browse areas of interest and if I spot any aspect of an article that I feel I can address, I usually edit it. As I’m Scottish I often found myself editing Scotland-related articles so signed up for the project.
- Drchriswilliams: I live in Scotland. Wikipedia is a valuable online resource but there are gaps and inaccuracies that are often more obvious when you live in the place that the article refers to.
- Nick: I live in Scotland and found myself involved in the WikiProject by accident really, I started writing about things I know about, so wrote about the areas that I have lived in, where I grew up and areas I'm familiar with.
Have you contributed to any of the project's Featured or Good Articles? What is the most difficult hurdle to overcome when building an article about Scotland to Featured status?
- Ben MacDui: See my User page for details of GA & FAs etc. It can be frustrating writing about the more obscure topics – reviewers sometimes want high quality references that don’t exist and enthusiasts’ websites are sometimes all there is to go on. Within reason, there is a place for local knowledge.
- Nick: I did a lot of work on Arbroath and got it up to a good standard, it was taken on to Good Article status later by other editors. I did take the article on The Glenlivet distillery to GA status and found it enjoyable, and had intended to get Whisky up to featured article status, but I'd say the biggest problem writing about Scotland is availability of sources. Scotland, having such an lengthy history, lacks good online resources and requires frequent trips to the library to get print sources.
Does Scotland receive the kind of attention that other countries in the United Kingdom get? Are there any significant gaps in the coverage of Scotland that don't plague the coverage of England or Wales?
- Ben MacDui: I think so and I’m not aware of any, although inevitably there are fewer editors at work than in the much more populous England. I'd like to think we punch above our weight.
- Drchriswilliams: Some parts of Scotland are remote and don't have the concentration of editors that large urban areas have. Wikipedia:WikiProject Scottish Islands is another project that has helped to try and overcome this barrier.
- Nick: I agree with the above comments, fewer people, fewer newspapers, fewer writers, it all adds conspires to make writing about some areas of Scotland very difficult, I'd expect it's difficult for authors to write material we can then use as reference material. It would be nice to see the National Archives at Kew publish more Scottish material, giving us more to write about.
Do you have any knowledge of the Scots language, and if so, have you ever edited the Scots Wikipedia?
- Ben MacDui: Yes to the first but although I have visited a couple of times, no to the second.
- Mutt Lunker: Yes. I have edited there but not for some time. I feel that speaking and writing in Scots has an important place as a means of expression in other media, written or spoken, but when it comes to a collaborative work of reference, as all speakers of Scots are also speakers of English and the Wikipedia for the latter is used and improved by numbers of people several orders of magnitude larger, resulting in a much larger resource, spending time largely duplicating effort in the Scots Wikipedia may be largely best left to when English Wikipedia is so mature it is largely finished (which may be effectively never). My understanding from when I last had a substantial visit is that the most active editors on the site are non-speakers and although I applaud their interest, it can’t aid the integrity of the content.
- Drchriswilliams: It is a big enough task trying to update the main Wikipedia pages!
- Nick: Yes, familiar enough with a number of local dialects, done a few edits to Scots Wikipedia but feel it's better served by well translated articles from English Wikipedia, rather than dedicated, written from scratch articles. There's a difference at times in perspective between, say, English and Chinese Wikipedia articles that is less noticeable between English and Scots articles, as they're more likely to be written by the same group of editors.
What can Wikipedians visiting or living in Scotland contribute to the project's photography? Are there any locations or objects that could be easily handled by anyone with a camera?
- Mutt Lunker: There may well be gaps that require to be filled but I’m not across where they may be, though I’ve added the odd photo when I feel it’s required.
- Drchriswilliams: Sure photos can help and there are currently projects in some of Scotland's museums, for example, to help share good quality images of important things.
- Nick: Yes, looking through the first two weeks of Wiki Loves Monuments uploads for Scotland, as usual, Edinburgh Castle, Calton Hill and a few other Scottish sites feature regularly, but only a few new sites not previously photographed have been added. We're in danger of being swamped by too many photographs of popular locations, buildings and sites.
Has WikiProject Scotland noticed an increase in activity in the project's articles due to the recent 2014 Commonwealth Games in Glasgow? Have you contributed to any of the articles about the Games?
- Drchriswilliams: The 2014 Commonwealth Games was a really great celebration of sport and culture, but I'm not aware of any major impact that it had on Wikipedia.
- Nick: Not that I can recall, certainly nothing major, maybe a few corrections or small updates.
As the Scottish referendum about independence is taking place this week, will WikiProject Scotland be working hard to cover its results and the possible new country, or is this left to the editors of WikiProject UK Politics?
- Ben MacDui: I’m interested in the result of course but I tend to avoid high-traffic current news articles. Depending on the result, there could be a huge amount of work to do but as I see Wikipedia as a repository of knowledge rather than a free news service, there's plenty of time to do whatever needs to be done.
- Drchriswilliams: I expect lots of people will have reasons to contribute, hopefully Wikipedia projects can help keep things encyclopaedic.
- Nick: I'd expect editors from everywhere will be contributing to our coverage of the referendum, but from what I'm led to believe, the result (Yes or No) will be announced when the outcome is mathematically guaranteed, the full results and detailed breakdown of the results will be available later on Friday 19th, so I'd expect our coverage on the referendum to expand more slowly throughout the day, rather than in a big burst. I'm stuck inside the bubble when it comes to the referendum, but know it's being reported very differently in various countries, so for a lot of our coverage, it's probably going to need a lot of help from people not connected with either the Scotland or UK Politics wikiprojects if we want to get an international view of events.
How can a new contributor help today?
- Ben MacDui: Create content about topics you are enthusiastic about.
- Mutt Lunker: Write about what you are interested in and know about or have the resources to find out about and back it up with sources. Point out improvements that are required on article talk pages but stick to that rather than general discussion of the topic.
- Drchriswilliams: Out of date content is sometimes more obvious to new contributors. If you have specialist or local knowledge then have a look for relevant pages on Wikipedia.
- Nick: I'd urge people to use their local knowledge to get involved, and to realise that because of the geographic spread of the population in Scotland, if they don't get involved, there might not be anybody else who will. We're in danger of losing easy, personal access to some information, in future it we could be more reliant on old newspapers and without a good idea about where to start, writing about things is going to be much harder.
Anything else you'd like to add to the interview?
- Ben MacDui: Unless the polls are wrong the referendum result will be very close. A lot of people are therefore going to be disappointed, whatever the result. In my experience the campaign has been a good-natured credit to the democratic process so far. I hope that we will make the edits that are needed in this same spirit rather than descending into bickering and point scoring. We should be the HCF to Twitter's LCD.
- Nick: I agree wholeheartedly with Ben MacDui, above.
Next week, we'll see what it takes to review a Good article and see how you can help attack the backlog. Up to then, you can always look in the archive for all past Wikiproject reports.
Discuss this story
I'm sorry to see all the interviewees regard ordinary "information" as the reason they focus on English Wikipedia (I note they refer to it as the "main" Wikipedia and not by its language). I would hope they would consider contributions to Scots Wikipedia as a means of cultural preservation. There may be a multitude of cultural codes (language, ideas, cultural understanding, etc., even jokes) that are endemic to Scots that are not conveyed appropriately by other languages. Even the idea that they are more comfortable in English underscores how they should make the extra effort to contribute to Scots Wikipedia more frequently. kosboot (talk) 11:13, 18 September 2014 (UTC)[reply]
The Scottish Gaelic language (not to be confused with the Scots language) had 57,000 speakers in Scotland in 2011, and the Scottish Gaelic version of Wikipedia (https://gd.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prìomh-Dhuilleag) has 17,273 articles. Editors who speak Scottish Gaelic are categorized in Category:User gd.
—Wavelength (talk) 17:02, 18 September 2014 (UTC)[reply]