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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. 134–154

Chapter 5
Sockpuppets, Wikifants, and Honeypots

Metaphorical patterns in digital discourses on Wikipedia talk pages

| University of Duisburg-Essen
This chapter analyses the discursive construction of collaborative text production via metaphors on talk pages of the English, French, and German Wikipedia. The cross-linguistic study makes use of the WikiDemoCorpus (WDC) to qualitatively reveal the source domains of these metaphors. Situated within the framework of discourse analysis in the tradition of Foucault (1966, 1969, 1971), the study analyses how Wikipedia authors use metaphors to create a certain point of view in their collaborations on talk pages. Additionally, the Wikipedia corpora available at the Leibniz Institute for the German Language (IDS) via the Corpus Search, Management and Analysis System II (COSMAS II) are used for exemplary quantification. Finally, the potential of further corpus linguistics methods for metaphor identification and analysis is discussed.
Keywords: Wikipedia, metaphors, corpus linguistics, discourse, collaboration
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Theoretical aspects
  • 3.Data and methodology
  • 4.Results and discussion
    • 4.1Qualitative findings in the WDC_Talk corpus
      • 4.1.1Metaphors of fabulous creatures
      • 4.1.2War metaphors
      • 4.1.3Wikifauna and Wikiflora: Zoological and botanical metaphors
      • 4.1.4Illness and addiction metaphors
      • 4.1.5Handicraft metaphors
    • 4.2Quantification and further potential of corpus linguistics methods for metaphor identification
  • 5.Concluding remarks
  • Notes
  • References
  • Tools and online resources
Published online: 31 October 2024
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/scl.121.05gre
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Tools and online resources
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DeReKo. 2020. Deutsches Referenzkorpus. 〈[URL]〉 (30 January 2020).
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. 2020d. Artikel Page elephant. 〈[URL]〉 (30 January 2020).
. 2020e. Honeypot. 〈[URL]〉 (30 January 2020).
. 2020f. Zombies. 〈[URL]〉 (30 January 2020).
. 2021a. Sockpuppetry. 〈[URL]〉 (30 March 2021).
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. 2021c. Faux-nez. 〈[URL]〉 (21 April 2021).
Wiktionary. 2021. Troll. 〈[URL]〉 (29 March 2021).