Wikipedian Disagreement: The Use of Politeness Strategies to Disagree in Wikipedia Metadiscussion Thesis Proposal

Transcription

1 Wikipedian Disagreement: The Use of Politeness Strategies to Disagree in Wikipedia Metadiscussion Thesis Proposal Ryan Dotson Introduction Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia that anyone can edit (Wikipedia:Main, n.d.), is quickly becoming the de facto source for information on the Internet. And because of the ubiquity of the Internet, Wikipedia could arguably be the single place many of us go when looking for general information. And quite often, I suspect, we find what we re searching for, likely due to the fact that, as of this writing, there are very nearly 3.1 million articles extant in English alone (Wikipedia:Main, n.d.). The key to how all of this information has come to exist on Wikipedia is simple: users. The whole of the Wikipedia encyclopedia is created by its over 85,000 (Wikipedia:About, n.d., para. 2) contributing users. The information presented on Wikipedia is consumed by approximately 65 million people per month in 2009, according to the site s user traffic reports (Wikipedia:About, n.d.). Perhaps by now, eight years after the site s inception, many, if not most, of the users visiting the site understand that Wikipedia is not a store of information presented from a group of great and powerful editors, but rather, people like themselves. While this does cause a certain imbalance of topic coverage and perhaps bias (Halavais & Lackaff, 2008; Royal & Kapila, 2009), it is still the key to the plethora of articles written and contributed to every day. Though users may be well aware that other users are creating and improving the articles presented to them, they may yet not understand how, in some cases, the extra work, discussion and crafting that goes into creating the finished article they read. Just behind the curtain of any article, we find that article s Talk or discussion page: the metadiscussion. Wikipedia instructs that [talk pages] are not to be used as a chat room, soapbox, battleground or for general discussion of the article topic (Wikipedia:Tutorial (Talk

2 Pages), n.d.), rather these are for users to discuss proposed changes to the article or to make note of a change that has been made. We could make an assumption that many edits made are of a very minor nature. For example, your author s most recent contribution to Wikipedia article was merely to add a bullet point to a list and to correct the spelling of a word. However, some edits that are made cannot be done so easily. This is where we would see the talk page come into play. In some cases, such as those articles relating to controversial topics or topics that have opposing views which are not verifiable and thus the parties must work to form agreements and present, as Wikipedia insists, a neutral article. (Wikipedia:Neutral point of view, n.d.) As users construct their arguments supporting, opposing or merely commenting, we would expect them to construct arguments that follow Wikipedia s guidelines for conducting oneself on talk pages: be polite, assume good faith, avoid personal attacks, be welcoming. (Talk:Intelligent Design, n.d.) This study examines the metadiscussion of one particular article, Intelligent Design, for how the interactants in this metadiscussion employ politeness strategies when disagreeing with each other in order to accomplish their ultimate goal of creating a better article, whilst operating under the guidelines set by Wikipedia. Literature Review Previous research into the area of disagreement shows a significant lack of literature with respect to disagreement in the realm of computer-mediated communication (hereafter, CMC). However, studies that have been conducted, such as those by Baym (1996) and Graham (2003), show that CMC seems to have an effect on how the interactants agree and disagree. Other factors seem to play a part; sometimes the participant s gender and the topic under discussion (Baym, 1996) and other times, group identity and Internet etiquette (Graham, 2003). But it still appears that this unique context seems to produce the same phenomena that we see in spoken versions of disagreement and agreement (Baym, 1996). This realm of CMC may seem, at first, irrelevant to Brown & Levinson s (1987) politeness theory, especially given its focus on face-to-face interactions. However, in a review of literature, Morand & Ocker (2003) find that

3 CMC contexts show evidence of employing negative and positive politeness strategies, just as we would see in a classic face-to-face situation. However, making the link between Brown & Levinson s (1987) politeness theory and agreement and disagreement seems less evident. In fact, there appears to be a complete lack of literature that frames agreement and disagreement in the light of politeness theory. However, Holtgraves (1997) begins to build the bridge between the two phenomena by relating the use of positive politeness strategies to disagreements and asserts that to disagree with another person is to threaten that person s positive face (p. 235). In the study, subjects were surveyed for their opinions on controversial topics and then selected in pairs with differing viewpoints. The resulting conversations were then examined using three of the super-strategies presented by Brown & Levinson (1987): seek agreement, avoid disagreement, and assert common ground (Holtgraves, 1997, p. 228) and within these categories were eleven sub-categories. Seeking a safe topic, overtly agreeing, and repeating utterances of the other interactant were all regarded as seeking agreement in the conversations. Ways of avoiding disagreement included hedging, self-deprecation and expressing distaste, as well as token disagreement ( yeah, but ), displacing agreement ( well ) and personalizing their opinion ( in my opinion ). Finally, the method for seeking common ground found in this study was by asserting common ground with the phrase you know. Research Questions What politeness strategies do interlocutors use when disagreeing in Wikipedia metadiscussion? Methodology Data Source The source of data for this study is a corpus of 1,750,072 words built from the entire collection of metadiscussion, or the Talk page, for the article Intelligent Design on Wikipedia. Within these pages, users can start threads of discussion that serve to organize the conversation. Users are asked to sign their contributions with their user name and a time stamp (Talk:Intelligent Design, n.d.).

4 This corpus includes the most recent talk, up to the point of data collection in early October The remainder of this metadiscussion is archived in 57 numbered archives available from the main Talk page. In the case of the Intelligent Design article, these archives are created automatically by a robot user depending on the date of a thread. If a thread is inactive for 30 days, it is automatically moved to an archive page (Talk:Intelligent Design, n.d.). The earliest marked point in the discussion is April, 2002, but entries exist without timestamps which may date from earlier. Instrument The framework for this study will be crafted from Brown & Levinson s (1987) politeness theory. Procedure I will begin at the earliest point in the data and move forward in time, selecting up to 100 instances of disagreement. By beginning at the earliest point, I will see the most resolved points of argument. If a topic was under discussion it would have, presumably, not lain dormant for 30 days, whereupon it would have been archived. Once the instances of joking have been selected, they will be counted and then categorized by the kind of joking that occurs. Limitations It is further important to note that it is possible that not all of the talk that has happened for this topic will be included in the corpus. On the Talk page for Intelligent Design, a frequently-asked questions section warns users that if their discussion is not directly related to the article it may be removed (Talk:Intelligent Design, n.d.). However, another possibility for such an off-topic discussion is to manually archive it. This frequently-asked question list also provides answers to oft-discussed topics as to minimize repetitive chatter on matters that have been previously resolved.

5 Preliminary Findings Positive Politeness Strategy: Joking Sure, maybe God talked over his ideas with the angels or even let them try their own experiments. A heavenly design team. [emphasis added] I'm open-minded on this detail. But as I reject dualism, I can't agree with your combination of good guys and bad guys (as creators). The article does not say anything about intelligent design, and I don't recognize any of the usual suspects' [emphasis added]names in the bibliography. In what sense do you claim this article to be a penetration of ID into the peer-reviewed literature? You're grasping at straws par for the course among ID advocates. It would be irresponsible for an encyclopedia to carry an article on a pseudoscience without pointing out that it is a pseudoscience. References Brown, P., & Levinson, S. C. (1987). Politeness: Some universals in language use. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Holtgraves, T. (1997). Yes, but positive politeness in conversation arguments. Journal of Language and Social Psychology, 16(2), doi: / x Halavais, A. & Lackaff, D. (2008). An analysis of topical coverage in Wikipedia. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, 13(2), doi: /j x Intelligent design. (n.d.). In Wikipedia. Retrieved November 14, 2009 from Morand, D. A., & Ocker, R. J. (2003). Politeness theory and computer-mediated communication: A sociolinguistic approach to analyzing relational messages. Proceedings of the 36th Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences (HICSS-36). Los Alamitos: IEEE Press. Retrieved from csdl.computer.org/comp/proceedings/hicss/2003/1874/01/1874toc.htm

6 Royal, C. & Kapila, D. (2009). What s on Wikipedia and what s not? Assessing completeness of information. Social Science Computer Review, 27(1), doi: / Wikipedia:About. (n.d.). In Wikipedia. Retrieved November 14, 2009, from Wikipedia:Main. (n.d.). In Wikipedia. Retrieved November 14, 2009 from Wikipedia:Neutral point of view. (n.d.). In Wikipedia. Retrieved November 14, 2009 from Wikipedia:Tutorial (Talk pages). (n.d.). In Wikipedia. Retrieved November 14, 2009 from