This book provides a concise yet comprehensive guide to Wikipedia for researchers and students of linguistics, discourse and communication studies, redressing the gap in research on Wikipedia in these fields and encouraging scholars to explore Wikipedia further as a platform and a medium. Drawing on Herring's situational and medium factors, as well as related developments in (critical) discourse studies, the author studies the online encyclopaedia both theoretically and empirically, examining its origins, production and consumption before turning to a discussion of its societal significance and function(s). This book will be of interest to Wikipedia scholars from a range of disciplines, as well as those with a broader interest in linguistics, discourse studies and the digital humanities. 

Susanne Kopf is an Assistant Professor of English Business Communication at  WU Vienna (Vienna University of Economics and Business), Austria. Her research interests include corpus-assisted (critical) discourse studies, Wikipedia and social media studies with a focus on exploring online communities’ debates and attitudes concerning well-known organizations and events.