Research Information System
., Roma, 2008
This work is a corpus based study focused on a new genre: Web 2.0 encyclopaedias. In particular, the attention is focused on the English edition of Wikipedia, a multilingual, web–based, co–authored encyclopaedic project. Findings of this study show to what extent Wikipedia’s co–authored articles prove to be formal and standardized in a way not very dissimilar from Encyclopaedia Britannica Online. By contrast, talk pages and WikiSpeak can be considered a new writing space where a novel variety of the NetSpeak Jargon is conveyed. Encyclopaedic articles and WikiLanguage, talk pages and WikiSpeak, can be considered, in McLuhan’s terms, the “medium and the message” of the new Web 2.0 collaborative environments. Thanks to them a new Computer Mediated Discourse Community with its specific linguistic peculiarities is coming to life.