«Cogitamus ergo sumus». Web 2.0 encyclopaedi@s: the case of Wikipedia

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.Antonella Elia, works in the field of Media Education and holds a Ph. D. in “English for Special Purposes” from the University of Naples “Federico II”. She has been a lecturer in the “Humanities and Computing” laboratories at the University of Naples “L’Orientale” since 2002. She has published several papers which connect languages, humanities and computing and she is the author of Inchiostro Digitale: tecnologie e scienze umane. Scrivere, comunicare, insegnare con i nuovi media (Ellissi, 2004) and Uomini di latta e sogni di metallo: cyborgs & cyberspaces nel mondo digitale anglofono (Ellissi, 2006).