The crowdsourced encyclopediaWikipedia is the 6th most visited of all websites. Wikipedia articles are written in a social process with heated arguments on dedicated discussion pages, one for each Wikipedia article. As Myers (2010) observes, English-language Wikipedians employ traditional means to support their arguments, but also Wikipedia-specific argumentative criteria, such as Neutral Point of View, No Original Research and Verifiability
The structure, openness and global scope of Wikipedia makes it feasible to extract large parallel corpora of argumentative writing from many different cultures, debating many different topics. In the first stage of our project, we have done a quantitative study of Wikipedia arguments, comparing the volume of debate surrounding the same 1,000 articles on 25 different language versions of Wikipedia. With this data, we compare argumentation, both on the same topic between languages, and between topics in the same language. Preliminary results show that cultural differences in sheer discussion volume are small, but that some interesting patterns are present.
In a second stage, we proceed with qualitative analysis of argumentative Wikipedia texts in selected languages. In the qualitative analysis we will present the intersection between standard and Wikipedia-specific argumentation, as well as the cultural transfer of Wikipedia argumentation between language versions.
The results will contribute to our knowledge about how digital literacy is related to traditional literacy and how teachers can meet new demands on writing practices, by integrating social media (Baron 2010. Erixon 2012).
2014.