Arguing across spaces in an online epistemic community

Abstract

Wikipedia is the most consulted source of information on the web, on a global level. The collective writing of articles, open to the participation of all, can give rise to major conflicts between contributors, in texts and debates, given the high stakes involved in achieving agreement on a public presentation of controversial topics. We present analyses of how disagreements are managed across socio-technical and dialogical spaces in French Wikipedia, with respect to two case studies, on Freud and the Turin Shroud. We adopt a mixed methods approach, combining results of analyses of interviews with moderators in these articles and argumentative discussions underlying them, within a broadly pragma-dialectical framework. We show, on one hand, that moderators’ attempts to resolve disagreements by requiring participants to cite sources simply displace conflicts to the nature of those sources, their validity, their authors and the good faith of their proponents. Debates concerning sources themselves draw on social actors’ perspectives in dialogical spaces, beyond the discussion itself. Disagreements are managed rather than resolved dialectically by displacing them to alternative socio-technical spaces, such as different sections of the text itself, or participants’ personal pages.