![Sample our Humanities journals, sign in here to start your FREE access for 14 days]({"type":"image" , "src" : "/sda/5939/TOC-Subject-Sample-2021-Humanities.jpg"})
ABSTRACT
Although previous research has revealed factors that affect Wikipedia editors' decisions regarding content retainment and deletion,Footnote1 there has been little research on the editors' discussion that is involved therein as a linguistic process. In this article, I study Wikipedia's Articles for Deletion (AfD) talk pages and conceptualize each discussion as a conflictual language game.Footnote2 I study, by using discourse analysis interpretively and critically, how participants (especially first movers) frame the discussion direction—either as an invitation to collaborate or with cascading arguments (leaving little room for casual chit-chat). Finally, I study entire AfD discussions and find two coexisting language games: the discussion game and the consultation/enforcement game. I find that the closing admins of AfD discussions function as policy experts rather than consensus facilitators. Hence, AfD discussions contain both sets of game rules, but ultimately the power of the decision is nonetheless vested in the admins. This brings background power dynamics into the grammar of language games in the struggle for the generation and sustenance of the dominant knowledge or narratives of our information society.
Notes
1. J. Schneider, A. Passant, and S. Decker, “Deletion Discussions in Wikipedia: Decision Factors and Outcomes,” WikiSym '12 (2012); and D. Taraborelli, and G. L. Ciampaglia, “Beyond Notability. Collective Deliberation on Content Inclusion in Wikipedia,” 2010 Fourth IEEE International Conference on Self-Adaptive and Self-Organizing Systems Workshop (2010): 122–25.
2. L. Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, 3rd ed. (Oxford, UK: Basil Blackwell, [1953] 1967).
3. L. McGoey, “Strategic Unknowns: Towards a Sociology of Ignorance,” Economy and Society 41 (2012): 1–16.
4. U. Beck, Risk Society (New York: Sage Publications, 1992); U. Beck, and D. Levy, “Cosmopolitanized Nations: Re-Imagining Collectivity in World Risk Society,” Theory, Culture & Society 30, no. 2 (2013): 3–31; A. Irwin, Sociology and the Environment (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2001); B. Perry, and P. Olsson, “Cyberhate: The Globalization of Hate,” Information & Communications Technology Law 18, no. 2 (2009): 185–99; and G. Spaargaren, “Sustainable Consumption: A Theoretical and Environmental Policy Perspective,” Society & Natural Resources: An International Journal 16, no. 8 (2003). doi:10.1080/08941920309192
5. A. Ardichvili, V. Page, and T. Wentling, “Motivation and Barriers to Participation in Virtual Knowledge-Sharing Communities of Practice,” Journal of Knowledge Management 7, no. 1 (2003): 64–77.
6. McGoey, “Strategic Unknowns: Towards a Sociology of Ignorance.”
7. M. Gross, “The Unknown in Process: Dynamic Connections of Ignorance, Non-Knowledge and Related Concepts,” Current Sociology 55, no. 5 (2007): 742–59.
8. P. Burke, A Social History of Knowledge: From Gutenberg to Diderot (New York: Wiley, 2000).
9. J.-F. Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, trans. G. Bennington and B. Massumi (Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 1984 [1979]).
10. M. McLuhan, The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1962); M. McLuhan, Understanding Media (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1964); M. McLuhan, and Q. Fiore, The Medium is the Massage: An Inventory of Effects (Corte Madera, CA: Gingko Press, 2001 [1967]).
11. R. N. Jacobs, and E. Townsley, “On the Communicative Geography of Global Sociology,” Canadian Journal of Sociology 33, no. 3 (2008): 503.
12. L. A. Stengrim, “Negotiating Postmodern Democracy, Political Activism, and Knowledge Production: Indymedia's Grassroots and E-Savvy Answer to Media Oligopoly,” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 2, no. 4 (2005): 281–304.
13. A. A. Cohen, Foreign News on Television: Where in the World is the Global Village? (New York: Peter Lang, 2013).
14. S. Niederer, and J. van Dijck, “ Wisdom of the Crowd or Technicity of Content? Wikipedia As a Sociotechnical System,” New Media and Society 12, no. 8 (2010): 1368–87; and S.-C. J. Yam, “Sociotechnical Interaction at Work: an Ethnographic Study of the Wikipedia Community,” Text & Talk 35, no. 5 (2015): 669–94, http://www.degruyter.com/view/j/text.2015.35.issue-5/text-2015-0016/text-2015-0016.xml (accessed December 23, 2015).
15. M. Deuze, “Participation, Remediation, Bricolage: Considering Principal Components of a Digital Culture,” The Information Society 22, no. 2 (2006): 63–75.
16. T. Haas, The Pursuit of Public Journalism: Theory, Practice and Criticism (Routledge, 2007), 156.
17. K. Tabb, “Authority and Authorship in a 21st-Century Encyclopaedia and a ‘Very Mysterious Foundation,’” eSharp 12 (2008): 12.
18. Ibid., 11.
19. Wikipedia offers three kinds of article-deletion processes according to the level of controversy of the deletion. I only study the process for the most controversial deletions because it can attract much debate—i.e., the AfD process.
21. Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations.
22. D. Bloor, Knowledge and Social Imagery, 2nd ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976 [1991]); D. Bloor, Wittgenstein, Rules and Institutions (London: Routledge, 1997).
23. A. Giddens, The Constitution of Society: Outline of the Theory of Structuration (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 1984).
24. H. Garfinkel, Studies in Ethnomethodology (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1967).
25. L. Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (New York: Humanities Press, 1921 [1961]).
26. See note 2 above.
27. D. Seidl, “General Strategy Concepts and the Ecology of Strategy Discourses: a Systemic-Discursive Perspective,” Organization Studies 28 (2007): 197.
28. A. Pickering, Science as Practice and Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992).
29. S. G. Shanker, Wittgenstein and the Turning-point in the Philosophy of Mathematics (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1987).
30. See note 2 above.
31. Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, 32.
32. A.-L. Fayard, and G. DeSanctis, “Evolution of an Online Forum for Knowledge Management Professionals: A Language Game Analysis,” Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication 10, no. 4 (2005). doi: 10.1111/j.1083-6101.2005.tb00265.x
33. C. Hardy, I. Palmer, and N. Philips, “Discourse As a Strategic Resource,” Human Relations 53 (2000): 1227.
35. Speedy deletion, suitable for least controversial deletes, is one of the two alternatives to AfD. See: R. S. Geiger, and H. Ford, “Participation in Wikipedia's Article Deletion Processes,” WikiSym '11 (2011): 201–2; Taraborelli and Ciampaglia, “Beyond Notability. Collective Deliberation on Content Inclusion in Wikipedia.”
36. Schneider, Passant and Decker, “Deletion Discussions in Wikipedia: Decision Factors and Outcomes.”
37. Taraborelli and Ciampaglia, “Beyond Notability. Collective Deliberation on Content Inclusion in Wikipedia.”
38. http://meta.wikimwiki/wiki/Association_of_Deletionist_Wikipedians; http://meta.wikimwiki/wiki/Association_of_Inclusionist_Wikipedians; B. Stvilia, M. B. Twidale, L. C. Smith, and L. Gasser, “Information Quality Work Organization in Wikipedia,” Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology 59, no. 6 (2008): 983–1001.
39. J. A. Colyvas and S. Jonsson, “Ubiquity and Legitimacy: Disentangling Diffusion and Institutionalization,” Sociological Theory 29 (2011): 27–53.
40. See note 33 above.
41. J. P. Gee, An Introduction to Discourse Analysis: Theory and Method, 3rd ed. (UK, Routledge, 2011); S. C. Herring, “Computer-Mediated Discourse Analysis: An Approach to Researching Online Behavior,” in Designing for Virtual Communities in the Service of Learning, ed. S. A. Barab, R. Kling, and J. H. Gray (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004).
42. N. Fairclough, Language and Power, 2nd ed (London: Longman, 2001).
43. M. A. K. Halliday, Language as Social Semiotic: The Social Interpretation of Language and Meaning (London: Edward Arnold, 1978).
44. A. L. Strauss and J. Corbin, Basics of Qualitative Research: Grounded Theory Procedures and Techniques, 2nd ed. (Sage, 1998).
45. http://en.wikipwiki/wiki/Wikipedia:Notability: “This page in a nutshell” accessed 22 Mar 2015
46. J. Horne, and S. Wiggins, “Doing Being ‘On the Edge’: Managing the Dilemma of Being Authentically Suicidal in an Online Forum,” Sociology of Health & Illness 31 (2009): 170–84.
47. See note 44 above.
48. See note 36 above.
50. G. Salmon, E-moderating: The Key to Teaching and Learning Online (London: Kogan Page, 2000).
51. J. Finlay and L. Willoughby, “Exploring Online Learning Relationships: a Case Study in Higher Education,” in Remote Relationships in a Small World, ed. S. Holland (Peter Lang Publishing, 2008).
52. http://en.wikipwiki/wiki/Wikipedia:Aircrash (accessed August 16, 2013)
53. http://en.wikipwiki/wiki/Wikipedia:EVENT#Lasting_effects (accessed August 19, 2013)
54. M. C. A. Castro, “Let's Chat: An Analysis of Some Discourse Features of Synchronous Chat,” Journal of English Studies and Comparative Literature 9, no. 1 (2007).
55. This name is anonymized.
56. http://en.wikipwiki/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:Notability_(academics)&oldid=555682370 (accessed March 23, 2015)
57. Ibid.
58. Ibid.
59. See note 55 above.
60. A.-L. Fayard, and G. DeSanctis, “Kiosks, Clubs and Neighborhoods: the Language Games of Online Forums,” Journal of the Association for Information Systems 9, no. 10/11 (2008): 693.
61. F. B. Viegas, M. Wattenberg, J. Kriss, and F. van Ham, “Talk Before You Type: Coordination in Wikipedia,” Proceedings of the 40th Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences (2007), http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=4076527 (accessed April 10, 2014).
62. S.-C. J. Yam, “A Sociology of Knowledge Approach to Cooperative Knowledge Generation: Ideology and Structural Tension of Nupedia,” West East Journal of Social Sciences 1, no. 1 (2012): 48–54, http://www.westeastinstitute.com/journals/wp-content/uploads/2013/02/5-Shing-Chung-Jonathan-Yam-A-Sociology-Of-Knowledge-Approach-To-Cooperative-Knowledge-Generation-Ideology-And-Structural-Tension-Of-Nupedia.pdf (accessed July 27, 2015); and S.-C. J. Yam, “Decommercialization and Anti-Elitism: Early Years of Wikipedia 2001–2002,” International Journal of Arts & Sciences 6, no. 1 (2013): 533–38, http://universitypublications.net/ijas/0601/pdf/SPQ603.pdf (accessed July 27, 2015)