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Investigating Wikipedia: Linguistic corpus building, exploration and analysis
Edited by Céline Poudat, Harald Lüngen and Laura Herzberg
[Studies in Corpus Linguistics 121] 2024
► pp. 107–133

Chapter 4
Investigating reply relations on Wikipedia talk pages to reconstruct interactional strategies of Wikipedia authors

| Leibniz-Institut für Deutsche Sprache,
| Leibniz-Institut für Deutsche Sprache,
This chapter presents the annotation and analysis of interpretative reply relations on Wikipedia talk pages using data from the WikiDemoCorpus (WDC). Building on an approach of annotating interpretative reply relations to analyze these relations in Wikipedia talk page posts, the chapter presents nine reply relation categories found in the German WDC. Additionally, linguistic cues for each category and the Wikipedia discussion pages overall are explained in detail, illustrated through reply relation targets. The results of the linguistic annotation are threefold: First, we provide an annotation scheme that can be used by third parties to produce more data according to their needs. Second, we shed light on and quantify the numerous ways Wikipedia authors reply to each other’s posts on talk pages. Finally, we provide richly annotated data that can be used for further analyses, such as identifying interactional relations on higher levels or training tasks in machine learning algorithms.
Keywords: Wikipedia talk pages, reply relations, referencing strategies, interactional structures, computer-mediated communication, CMC
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Background and motivation
    • 2.1Wikipedia talk pages: Structure of posts
    • 2.2Interpretative reply relations
  • 3.Linguistic annotation
    • 3.1Research questions
    • 3.2Data: WikiDemoCorpus
    • 3.3Methodology: Annotation process and guidelines
  • 4.Results
  • 5.Discussion and conclusion
  • Notes
  • References
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References (14)
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