Special appeal : Scots Wikipedia contributors needed!

I've just found myself writing a rather impatient email reply to someone whose heart is in the right place, but who I think is lashing out in entirely the wrong direction. Basically, he's one of only two active editors on the Scots language Wikipedia at the moment, and he's annoyed with me for a) having created several hundred short articles in 2005/6 on non-Scottish politicians, and b) not maintaining those articles. I told him that in creating the articles I wasn't entering into a lifetime commitment, and that in my view it was healthy for the Scots Wikipedia not to become ghettoised in Scottish-only topics. I added that the growth of any user-generated site depends on people feeling free to write about subjects that they know about and are interested in, and that if he wanted the site to thrive it was counter-productive to berate someone for actually creating articles six years ago!

Nevertheless, I'm terribly sad to learn that the site has been so neglected of late. It occurred to me that many readers of this blog may not even be aware that a Scots language Wikipedia exists, so I thought I'd give it a mention in case anyone is interested in becoming a contributor. For obvious reasons, it's much more of a blank canvas than the English Wikipedia, so there are far fewer constraints on writers. (It's become almost unbearable to contribute to the English wiki in recent years - if you dare to even insert a comma somewhere, a zealot will pop up out of nowhere and bang you over the head with Wikipedia Rule XY75-RF.)

If you'd like to set up a Scots Wikipedia account, click HERE.