Available in Scots Owner Wikimedia Foundation Commercial No | Headquarters Miami, Florida Website sco.wikipedia.org | |
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Type of site Internet encyclopedia project | ||
The Scots Wikipedia (Scots: Scots Wikipaedia) is the Scots language version of Wikipedia, and is run by the Wikimedia Foundation. It was established on 23 June 2005, and first reached 1,000 articles in February 2006, and 5,000 articles in November 2010. As of March 2017, it has about 43,000 articles. The Scots Wikipedia is one of five Wikipedias written in an Anglic language, the others being the English Wikipedia, the Simple English Wikipedia, the Pitkern-Norfuk Wikipedia and the Old English Wikipedia, although the last is largely unintelligible to native English or Scots speakers.
Reception
By February 2008, the site contained 2,200 articles, and had already outpaced other Wikipedias, such as Maori Wikipedia and Kashmiri Wikipedia. Reported reception, however, was mixed, with Scotland on Sunday's literary editor describing it as "convoluted at best, and an absolute parody at worst," while Ted Brocklebank, culture spokesman for the Scottish Tories, described it as a "cheap attempt at creating a language." However, Dr Chris Robinson, director of the Dictionary of the Scots Language, spoke more positively of the site, noting: "The fact it is doing well gives a lie to all those people who decry Scots and try to do it down." And Jane C Hu of Slate.com describes how it is regarded as a "joke" by some and goes on to debate whether Scots is really its own language or just a dialect of English, and therefore whether someone who proposed to delete the Wikipedia because it was a "joke project" was right or not.