ABSTRACT
Wikipedia is a useful work of reference, a vast, free, online encyclopaedia. Wikipedia is a community in the Internet sense: a loose, world-wide grouping of otherwise unrelated members. It might be classed as a bridging group, that is, a group one of whose aims is to recruit as many members as possible. On the Wikipedia site, two different languages are used. There is the style of the articles themselves, the public encyclopaedia, and there is the style of the various discussion pages. The articles are in a formal style quite suitable for its purposes, though it has been criticized as somewhat bland and anaemic. Even Wikipedia, discourse-centred and democratic as it is, requires some form of leadership or overseeing. This is provided by a small number of editors who have system administrator privileges such as the right to protect articles that have been subject to repeated vandalism.
