13 April 2016

Greg Myers (Lancaster University)

The Doctrine of Correctness on Wikipedia: Debates on the Manual of Style

The Wikipedia Manual of Style (MoS), like everything else on Wikipedia, is negotiated by editors making revisions and (ideally) offering reasons for their changes. But the issues in the Manual are treated as matters of aesthetics, not of facts; they are explicitly linked to principles but implicitly linked to identities. Academic linguists may find the heated, cyclical, inward-looking discussions of the MoS rather strange. But appeals to expertise are problematic on Wikipedia and probably should be. Saying ‘As a linguist’ gets you nowhere. I consider a set of statements on the MoS, revisions to them, and arguments offered for or against these revisions, to explore the understanding of correctness and variation in usage that emerges from these interactions.

Greg Myers teaches in the Department of Linguistics and English Language at Lancaster University. His research has focused on discourse analysis of academic writing, advertising, broadcast talk, research focus groups and interviews, and blogs, wikis and Twitter. He has been editor of Discourse Context & Media, and co-editor of the Benjamins book series Discourse Approaches to Politics, Society & Culture.