Materials and Methods
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 September 2014
Summary
As far as the material for the study is concerned, the analysis of online encyclopedias is based on the investigation of 78 of the most popular encyclopedic sites currently available on the web. The material for the analysis of Wikipedia discourse comprises a collection of all articles beginning with letter U available on Wikipedia, i.e. 968 entries. Such a choice enabled the inclusion into the material of articles of various length and subject matters. The articles were collected between December 2006 and December 2007.
The first part of the description concentrates on a genological analysis of web pages. In this part, the analytical methods proposed by traditional genology are modified and updated to include medium specific properties of the genres appearing on the world wide web (i.e. page design, components and functionality).
The second part presents the description of the Wikipedia discourse, involving the evaluation of the dominant discourse properties of the entries, the most common sentence structures and properties of the lexicon. The aim of qualitative observations is to illustrate the nature of the information and the organization thereof.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Genre Analysis of Online EncyclopediasThe Case of Wikipedia, pp. 14Publisher: Jagiellonian University PressPrint publication year: 2010