Some quick thoughts on the ‘Wikipedia Scots’ thing. Clearly this unfortunate editor has misunderstood a few things about Scots, but some of the pained/furious reaction is just as dubious as those odd sentences.

To me this episode is not a bizarre fiasco at all; it nicely condenses some fascinating and well-established debates in Scottish literature and politics, about which I’d now like to bore you.

1st and most obviously: it’s hard to view minoritised language outside the dominant frame of ‘authenticity’ and living communal speech. Resorting to online dictionaries and labour-saving databases - exactly what MacDiarmid would be doing in 2020, btw - can seem artificial...

and disqualifying. But this very tension is where much of the literary interest and excitement of Scots has been focused: the fact there are no rules is half the point, and a rich aesthetic opportunity; though constantly in tension with with the imperative to save the language..

by making it teachable in standard, authoritative forms. 2nd: the tacit boundaries of linguistic community closely track those of social/national belonging, in ways that trigger all kinds of queasiness in Scotland today.

Because Scots revivalism is deeply embedded in cultural nationalism, the ‘ethnic v civic’ canard is baked into most of its debates. So the Q of who should be claiming and using Scots, or having authority about it, directly impinges on who’s Scottish and what Scottishness is.

Touchy stuff, because the strong (and v laudable) elite consensus favouring an inclusive, immigrant-welcoming view of Scottish nationality is not really mirrored by the social attitude evidence. (As in several other areas, Scottish politics is more liberal than Scottish society.)

So the stakes are high: as Étienne Balibar argued decades ago, the notion of ‘language community’ is actually even more potent (because concrete) than notions of race. This shouldn’t stop us gently unpacking the assumptions underlying the reaction, and trying to learn something.

3rd: As I’ve written elsewhere, most modern Scots writing functions (to the reader, to the writer) as an ethnicised para-English, and consciously exploits the uncertain and ‘nebulous’ difference between ‘Scots’ and ‘English’.

I’m not suggesting the Wikipedian was doing something competent or useful in this debatable land, but their method of jazzing up the pizza-base of English with some exotic local flavours is really not that different from how much of Scottish vernacular writing gets made (ducks)

4th and finally: I hope this episode doesn’t become a clinching argument against ‘non-Scottish’ people messing around with Scots. Most diaspora Scots are interested in honouring their grandpas and cultivating their ‘roots’ in well-meaning *and* questionable ways...

but note that some of the most wildly inventive Scots poetry of the last century was written in consciously ’synthetic’ ways by foreign-born writers, most obviously Sidney Goodsir Smith: https://www.scottishpoetrylibrary.org.uk/poet/sydney-goodsir-smith/

Let’s not start issuing visas and prohibitions; though I agree there is a genuine need for reliable, institutional supports for the future of Scots. And needless to add there are sophisticated, well-developed debates about all these issues in Scots activist and linguistic circles

There are juicy debates about class, power and representation running alongside (and through) debates about standardising Scots -- once you've giggled or lamented about the Wikipedian, dive in! Here's a pugnacious starting point: https://sites.google.com/site/scotsthreip/robertsonianism

Update: there's now a big discussion on Wikipedia about this, including mortified apologies from the poor kid. (Luckily only a few people are being nasty.) Whatever they decide to do, I hope the 'current' (deeply flawed) version is archived somewhere https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Requests_for_comment/Disruptive_editing_on_sco.wikipedia_on_an_unparalleled_scale