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In:Investigating Wikipedia: Linguistic corpus building, exploration and analysis
Edited by Céline Poudat, Harald Lüngen and Laura Herzberg
[Studies in Corpus Linguistics 121] 2024
► pp. 205–234

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Chapter 8
Disagreements and conflicts in Wikipedia talk pages

 | Côte d’Azur University, CNRS, BCL
 | Côte d’Azur University, CNRS, BCL
Published online: 31 October 2024
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https://doi.org/10.1075/scl.121.08pou
Abstract
Collaborative situations inevitably generate disagreements and even conflicts. Over the last decade, Wikipedia has been extensively studied, but mostly from the perspective of social sciences. Conflicts have been described in great detail, along with phenomena such as quality, coordination, or in relation to maintenance work. However, most of the studies available did not define, nor measure conflicts from a linguistic perspective. The following chapter concentrates on two types of speech acts, which we consider to be of particular significance, namely speech acts expressing disagreement on the one hand, and a set of clearly offensive speech acts, such as insults or derogatory language, on the other hand. Our approach is corpus-based: the two typologies which are presented in our chapter were developed based on an annotation of speech acts in a corpus of Wikipedia discussions in French, partly extracted from the WikiDemoCorpus. The chapter then expands on the annotation which was carried out, and on the specific features of conflicts and disagreements in Wikipedia.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.A corpus representative of conflicts in Wikipedia talks
    • 2.1Conflict regulation in Wikipedia
    • 2.2Page selection
  • 3.Conflicts in Wikipedia talks: Categories of disagreement and verbal attacks
    • 3.1Thread-level annotation
    • 3.2Disagreements
    • 3.3Verbal attacks
  • 4.Results
    • 4.1Disagreements
    • 4.2Verbal attacks
      • 4.2.1Reproaches
      • 4.2.2Insults
      • 4.2.3Threats
  • 5.Discussion and future perspectives
  • Notes
  • References
References (58)
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