Investigating Wikipedia: Linguistic Corpus Building, Exploration and Analysis

The present volume is intended as a reference book on Wikipedia corpus studies, from corpus construction to exploration and analysis. Wikipedia is a complex object, difficult to manipulate for linguists and corpus researchers. In addition to the encyclopedic articles consulted by millions of users, it contains vast spaces of written discussions, aka talk pages, where Wikipedia authors negotiate the collaborative editing of articles, make evaluations, or discuss related topics. The proposed volume covers Wikipedia articles, their revision histories, and discussions, with a focus on discussions, which have not been studied extensively so far and have also been neglected in previous corpus building efforts. Wikipedia discussions are instances of computer-mediated communication (CMC), thus constituting a completely different, interaction-oriented linguistic genre. Sophisticated tools and methods of linguistic annotation and corpus exploration are needed to exploit the huge and valuable corpus resources that can be constructed from the Wikipedia discussions. The present volume aims at encouraging and facilitating Wikipedia corpus studies, providing standards, recommendations, and innovative methods to build and explore Wikipedia corpora, and presenting corpus studies that make the most of the peculiarities of Wikipedia.