"COGITAMUS ERGO SUMUS". Web 2.0 Encyclopaedi@s: the case of Wikipedia. A Corpus Based Study

Antonella Elia
2008
A doctoral degree is not simply writing a thesis. It is an enriching, although sometimes terrifying journey in which, luckily, you are not alone since along with you, there are many other people. The supervision, expertise, encouragement and patience of my travel companions have been indeed essential for me to conclude my journey and reach my final destination. For this reason I wish to thank the doctoral board of English For Special Purposes, and in particular, Prof. Gabriella Di Martino who
more » ... aced her trust in my research abilities, Dr. Cristina Pennarola for guiding me through the intellectual and empirical process of my research work and supporting me throughout while sharing my enthusiasm for my topic and findings. My thanks are also due to Prof. Vanda Polese, who gave me precious suggestions during these years and Mrs Mena Vilardi for dealing with all the administrative duties and deadlines of my doctorate. I also wish to express my gratitude to Prof. Jocelyne Vincent, my long life mentor and to all my new and numerous Wikipedian friends to whom I apologize in advance for not including them individually in this list. On a more personal note, I would like to thank my family and my friends, for believing in me even when others did not (myself included), and for having constantly supported me throughout this stage of my life. I would also like to thank my partner, Giuseppe who grinned and bore me through what was at times a very hard life not only for me but also for the people next to me. Last but not least, I thank the authors, editors and readers of both Encyclopaedia Britannica and Wikipedia. Collecting knowledge is a noble, challenging and endless task, which they achieve with the best of intentions and infinite enthusiasm. ABSTRACT This doctoral research is a corpus based study focused on a new genre: Web 2.0 online encyclopaedias. In particular, the attention is focused on the English edition of Wikipedia, a multilingual, web-based, co-authored encyclopaedic project. In the introduction, the encyclopaedic genre and its milestones are presented from a diachronic point of view and the genre evolution and its migration from the paper format to the web is explored. Then, a general overview of Wikipedia and Encyclopaedia Britannica Online is carried out, followed by a presentation of wiki, as a new textual genre, with its new collaborative writing model. In the first part of this research, the linguistic analysis focuses on an intra-genre investigation which compares Wikipedia vs. Britannica encyclopaedic articles dealing on with the same topic. Index of Readability and Web Usability are then explored. In the second part, an intergenre analysis contrastively analyzes Wikipedia talk pages and encyclopaedic entries. The WikiSpeak, the spoken-written language used by Wikipedians in their backstage community, is also taken into account. Findings of this research show to what extent Wikipedia's coauthored articles prove to be formal and standardized in a way not very dissimilar from Encyclopaedia Britannica Online. By contrast, talk pages and WikiSpeak can be considered a new writing space where a novel variety of the NetSpeak Jargon is conveyed. Encyclopaedic articles and WikiLanguage, talk pages and WikiSpeak, can be considered, in McLuhan's terms, the "medium and the message" of the new Web 2.0 collaborative environments. Thanks to them a new Computer Mediated Discourse Community with its specific linguistic peculiarities is coming to life.
doi:10.6092/unina/fedoa/1818 fatcat:jj25f6ajfzhmjjndj5kdmaeozu