Project description

Following the assumptions of Discourse Analysis, the main objective of this project is to analyse how interactions in Wikipedia communities affect linguistic aspects of users´ opinion building and knowledge construction.

This type of analysis will recognize linguistic forms as resources relied on by users by contributing (“externalising”) facts and evaluations to articles and talk pages that reflect the knowledge and opinions built on the Web. In this regard, we analyse how users externalise opinion and knowledge under different circumstances. In particular, the study will be focused on user interaction in different language groups regarding the same topic, and on user interaction regarding articles which address topics with varying degrees of controversy (homogeneous vs. heterogeneous opinions on a subject). This project intended to provide empirical evidence from Linguistic Discourse Analysis of Wikipedia to support the ACE model proposed by Cress and her team.  This research is based on naturalistic observations of selected articles in Wikipedia, as well as their talk pages. Following Discourse Analysis principals, we describe regularities found in linguistic utterances used by individuals to convey meaning. 

Cooperations

• Prof. Dr. Guadalupe Alvarez (CONICET, UNGS, Argentina)

• Prof. Dr. Laura Ferrari (UNGS, Argentina)