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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. 235–262

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Chapter 9
To each their own truth

Epistemic regimes on Wikipedia talk pages

 | Université de Bordeaux, SPH
 | University of Toulouse Jean Jaurès, CNRS, CLLE
 | Côte d’Azur University, CNRS, BCL
 | University of Toulouse Jean Jaurès, LERASS
Published online: 31 October 2024
DOI logo with link
https://doi.org/10.1075/scl.121.09car
Abstract
This chapter presents five epistemic regimes we defined for characterizing the conception of “truth” that underpin debates amongst Wikipedian editors on talk pages. The chapter starts by defining each epistemic regime and how it could be understood according to the Wikipedia rules. Then, we propose a method to evaluate the operationality of these regimes from a corpus standpoint and to analyse to what extent these regimes are adopted by Wikipedians. The analysis of the annotation of 324 posts extracted from the French WikiDemoCorpus largely supports our epistemic model and provides new insights into the ideological backgrounds of Wikipedians.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Dialogue and disagreements on Wikipedia
    • 2.1The role of rules and dialogue in the Wikipedian episteme
    • 2.2Disagreements on Wikipedia
    • 2.3Toward a model of validity: Epistemic regimes
  • 3.Wikipedia’s main epistemic regimes
    • 3.1The encyclopedic regime
      • 3.1.1Sources of authority
      • 3.1.2Consensus-based and elitist knowledge
      • 3.1.3An educational mission
    • 3.2The scientist regime
      • 3.2.1Wikipedia should be an academic frontier
      • 3.2.2An expert contributor
      • 3.2.3Keeping controversies at bay
    • 3.3The critical regime
      • 3.3.1Can sources be independent?
      • 3.3.2A revealing perspective
      • 3.3.3The impossible NPOV
    • 3.4The doxic regime
      • 3.4.1Truth of common sense
      • 3.4.2Low source requirements
      • 3.4.3A “journalistic” neutrality
      • 3.4.4A mainstream reader
    • 3.5The wiki regime
      • 3.5.1Relativistic neutrality
      • 3.5.2A free and autonomous reader
      • 3.5.3A suspicion toward sourcing
    • 3.6The heuristic virtues of epistemic regimes for understanding editorial disagreements
  • 4.Corpus and annotation
    • 4.1Working sample
    • 4.2Annotation of the working sample
      • 4.2.1Double-blind annotation
      • 4.2.2Adjudication
  • 5.Results and analyses
    • 5.1Regime distribution
    • 5.2Regime particularities and variation
  • 6.Discussion and conclusion
  • Notes
  • References
References (22)
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