Baker, M.J. & Détienne, F. (2024). Arguing across spaces in an online epistemic community: case studies in controversial Wikipedia articles. Journal of Argumentation in Context, 13:1, 1-48. https://doi.org/10.1075/jaic.00023.bak
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 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. 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.