Elia.+Wikis,+Wikipedia,+and+collaborative+technology

=Elia, Antonella. "An Analysis of Wikipedia Digital Writing." =

CiteSeerx. Pennsylvania State University. PDF. [|http://www.sics.se/jussi/newtext/working_notes/04_elia_new.pd]. 6-8

=Abstract =

The purpose of the article is to present a comparison between Encyclopaedia Britannica Online and Wikipedia. Elia presents research that shows how Wikipedia is capable of providing more information than Britannica due to a function called WikiSpeak and WikiLanguage. After much research, Elia was able to conclude that "Wikipedia's co-authored articles is formal and standardized in a way similar to that found in Encyclopaedia Britannica Online" (Elia 1)

= Argument =

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The entire article is a comparison between Wikipedia and Encyclopaedia Britannica Online through linguistic analysis. The Encyclopaedia Britannica, for example, contains 100,000+ articles that are considered accurate, reliable, and well-written. For non-subscribers, Britannica can be viewed in short, yet knowledgeable summaries, where as subscribers can see the entire article. Wikipedia on the other hand is a free interface for all web users. It is an example of a "collaborative hypermedium" (Elia 1) where the users of the page are given the opportunity to their own knowledge of the source onto the page to be viewed by other readers. However, because anyone with a computer can make edits to the pages, Wikipedia can become highly unreliable.=====

The article also did a comparison on written text. Wikipedia seems to have developed its own language, called WikiSpeak. WikiSpeak is an abbreviation for long phrases and words (neutral point of veiw becomes NPOV, collaboration of the week becomes COTW, etc.), allowing for more information to be placed onto the page. In a comparison between Britannica and Wikipedia's number of words per page, Wikipedia outnumbered Britannica by about 8000 words.

Although the two E-ncyclopedia's have many differences, these differences seem to show that they have alot in common. Even though Wikipedia outnumbers the amount of words written in Britannica's articles, their articles tend to distribute the same amount of information in a clear, concise and formal way.

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= Key Passages =

"Wikis are co-authoring tools which allow collective collaboration. They can be, simultaneously, a repository of information and an asynchronous tool of communication and discussion across the web (see Wikipedia)." (2)

"'Document mode' is expository, extensive, monological, formal, refined and less creative than 'thread mode'. It is in third person and unsigned." (2)

"'Thread mode' is dialogical, open, collective, dynamic and informal. It develops organically, without a predictive structure. It expresses public thinking, presents multiple positions and is exploratory. Entries are phrased in first person and are signed." (2)

"The first objective of this research has been directed towards the investigation of Wikipedia articles and on what has been defined, in this paper as “WikiLanguage”, the formal, neutral and impersonal language used in the official encyclopedic articles. (3)

"... 'WikiSpeak', the language spoken-written by Wikipedians in their informal backstage community." (4)

"It is aimed at changing the society of the 21st century by giving control over content to everyone and thus enhancing freedom of expression and recovering the original aim of the World Wide Web inventor: Sir Tim Berners Lee wanted the web to be a boundless library of Babel and not a global supermarket as it has become in the dot.com era." (6) = = =Work Cited= Biber Douglas. 1988. Variation across speech and writing. Cambridge University Press. Cambridge, UK.

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