behave more like web-pages set up to “read, write or comment on messages about a specific topic” (Cassany, 2012: 210). They aim to take advantage of the nature of asynchronous specialized discussion forums, on which the expectation is that contributions should be reflective and foster critical thought (Eligio Mendoza et al., 2016: 100). However, just as on these, there is plenty of hostility, divergence of opinion, and competition between article editors. Wikipedia discussions follow similar patterns to those occurring on debate forums where “the discursive phenomena observed are more closely related to polemic interchange than the search for consensus (Gouti, 2006)” (Pano Alamán, 2008: 35).

Whatever the case, it is abundantly clear that there is a high level of conflict in discussions about articles, which can even escalate into what have been termed guerras de edición ‘edit wars’. As we shall see, the Spanish version of Wikipedia is not exempt from this issue. Although the term “collaboration” may be used, given that many people are jointly participating in the production of knowledge, it seems that it is often less a case of collaboration, and more one of competition. In fact, many interventions are limited to modifying or removing the contributions of other authors (Collier and Bear, 2012: 385). As a direct result of this situation, in the context studied, the bitter defense of a point of view gives rise to a diversity of (im)politeness strategies.

3. Methodology, objectives, and corpus for analysis

In this study we attempt both quantitative and qualitative analyses of two articles and their associated discussions in the Spanish version of Wikipedia: “Spanish language” and “Controversy over the name of the Spanish language”. We will address the collaborative nature of the online encyclopedia’s construction and also analyze the discussion forums that are generated in the process.

Objectives

Ob.1. To monitor activity on the two articles “Spanish language” and “Controversy over the name of the Spanish language” and their respective discussions.

Ob.2. To quantify how the articles and discussions are evolve: according to size in terms of number of bytes, characters and words; the number of visits recorded to each page within the last 60 days, the number of edits made and the number of editors (identified, anonymous or IP and bots).

Ob.3. To detail content creation and watching activity on the two articles: in terms of the number of watchers, the number of editors and the volume of content creation by the ten most active users. To investigate whether this concerns an autoridad libre ‘free authority’ (Claes and Deltell, 2020) monopolistic discourse.

Ob.4. To analyze the apparent quality of entries, measured as a function of certain parameters such as references: unambiguous references, academic or scientific references, as well as the curation of the articles in terms of the number of sections and other resources.

Ob.5. To make a qualitative analysis of (im)politeness strategies appearing on the discussion pages associated with the two articles upon which this work focuses.