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<Paper uid="W06-2804">
  <Title>An analysis of Wikipedia digital writing</Title>
  <Section position="4" start_page="18" end_page="19" type="metho">
    <SectionTitle>
4. WikiSpeak
</SectionTitle>
    <Paragraph position="0"> The second phase of this research will focus on Wikipedia as &amp;quot;Computer Mediated Discourse Community&amp;quot; and on the language, defined in this paper as &amp;quot;WikiSpeak&amp;quot;, the language spoken-written by Wikipedians in their informal backstage community. The medium has developed its own wired style and specific glossary, which resembles in some aspects the hackers' Jargon File. The main WikiSpeak distinctiveness lies in the lexicon used.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="1"> WikiSpeak is an unofficial and high-context language which can be considered as a new variety of the Netspeak, one of the most creative domains of contemporary English. Its peculiarity is immediately evident in the &amp;quot;wikilogisms&amp;quot; found in the Community Portal homepage (i.e. stub, NPV, wikify, backlogs, FAQ, village pump, etc.) which can be considered, for its lexical density, a supreme synthesis of WikiSpeak, as well as a political manifesto as the wiki philosophical essence and its informal community style are clearly disclosed here  .</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="2"> The present investigation has started from its analysis in order to measure the impact of the  In the Community Portal homepage, of 1604 words used, 809 are unique words. The lexical density is very high 50.4%. The keywords are: help (19), you (16), article (16), collaboration (8), free (7).</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="3"> community front door (content, form, functionality) on the reader, and it will go on analysing the WikiSpeak used in discussion pages connected to the selected articles.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="4"> A large number of new words have emerged.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="5"> WikiSpeak is an informal and colloquial language rich, for example, in acronyms [i.e. NPOV (Neutral Point Of View), COTW (Collaboration Of The Week), IFD (Image For Deletion), etc]. Plenty of abbreviations are also found. They are individual words reduced to two or three letters, [i.e. pls (please), bb ppls (bye bye peoples), etc]. Some abbreviations are like rebuses, as the sound value of the letter, or numeral, acts as a syllable of a word [i.e. B4N (bye for now), CYL (see you later), etc]. Wiki acronyms used in wiki CMC (discussion pages, mailing lists, IRC channels, instant messaging and personal user pages) are not restricted to words or short phrases, but can be sentence-length [i.e. WDYS (what did you say?), CIO (check it out), etc].</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="6"> Many word processes take place in WikiSpeak, including several ludic innovations. A popular method of creating wikilogisms is to combine two separate words to make new compound words. Some elements turn up repeatedly, i.e. Wiki (WikiPage, WikiBooks, WikiLink, WikiStress, etc.)  . In addition, WikiSpeak makes large use of blends (namespace, infobox, quickpoll, etc.) and semantic shifts [i.e. orphan, mirror, stub, etc] shown in the wiki glossary available for the newbies.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="7"> Distinctive graphology is also an important feature of WikiSpeak. All orthographic features have been affected. For example, the status of capitalization varies greatly. There is a strong tendency to use lowercase everywhere on the net. The lower-case default mentality means that any use of capitalization is a marked form of communication. Messages wholly in capitals are considered to be shouting and usually avoided. A distinctive feature of Wiki graphology is the way two capitals are used: one initial, one medial.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="8"> This phenomenon is called BiCapitalization (BiCaps or CamelCase  ) and is widespread in  In Wikipedia veterans avoid their use as it is considered cliche. However it is tolerated when it refers to technical terms (i.e. wikilinks).</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="9">  CamelCase is the practice of writing compound words or phrases where the words are joined without spaces, and each word is capitalized within the compound. The  Wiki community (i.e. MediaWiki, WikiProject, etc.). It is a very interesting example of how a programming language influences the wired style, as BiCaps were used in hackers' communities as a word joiner alternative to the underscore based style and, in the original wiki convention to create links before the invention of [[ _ ]] square brackets. Now it has become fashionable in marketing for names of products and companies. Outside these contexts, however, BiCaps are rarely used in formal written English, and most style guides recommend against it.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="10"> Spelling practice is also a WikiSpeak distinctive character. New spelling conventions have emerged, such as the replacement of plural -s by -z. Emotional expressions make use of a varying number of vowels and consonants (yayyyyyyy) and repeated punctuation (WHAT????), but punctuation sometimes tends to be minimalist or completely absent, a great deal depends on the user's personality: some Wikipedians are scrupulous about maintaining a traditional punctuation while some do not use it at all. On the other hand, there is an increased use of symbols not normally part of the traditional punctuation system, such as # , or repeated dots (...), hyphens (---), repeated use of commas (,,,) or asterisks (***). WikiSpeak, as a new variety of the NetSpeak Jargon, can be considered as a creative domain, an independent and individual expression of the linguistic freedom of self-representation in the wiki community of practice.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="11"> This research will make use of textual linguistics and corpus linguistics for the investigation of the interactions expressed in the unofficial and informal Wiki CMC.</Paragraph>
  </Section>
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