Hey I think

From Devwiki

The current paper seeks to identify how it is that Wikipedians express their positions and connect with readers via investigating a 1.5 million word corpus of Wikipedia's articles as well as their parallel Talk Pages from 4 soft and 4 hard sciences. I investigate the employment of a number of rhetorical devices that are characteristic of academic discourses in what I label "the encyclopedia's academic core" to position such a core among other (academic) discourses. Results show that Wikipedia's academic discourses are closer to PhD theses than MA theses in terms of the devices investigated. These results indicate that Wikipedia's academic core is edited by highly skilled academic writers. This, in turn, has implications for the authoritativeness of the information offered in the encyclopedia: If the editors show that high level of professionalism in their writing as to the employment of the rhetorical devices, they are equally expected to present information that is no less accurate than, or at least close to, that offered in other academic genres like PhD theses and Research articles. In addition, the research shows that it is possible for massively collaborative work as that related to editing the encyclopedia to maintain discursive levels of academicity achieved in works done by single authors or a few group of authors. This finding will potentially be a useful addition to rhetorical theory, the paper being the first, as far as the researcher knows, to investigate the employment of rhetorical devices in massively collaborative work generally and in Wikipedia specifically.