Collaborative definitions: an analysis of trope-making on the TV tropes Wiki

As digitally mediated communication (DMC) further develops, it offers valuable insight into human interaction to linguists and other researchers, with communication platforms such as Twitter and Wikipedia providing rich sources of data with their vast supply of textual records. Each platform of digitally mediated interaction is unique and allows for an individual understanding of how users connect and interact via particular software and site parameters. This study explores collaborative authorship in the online wiki TV Tropes, a combination encyclopedia and dictionary of media devices, where wiki editors, or tropers, can work democratically to create new jargon (tropes) for the wiki dictionary. This quantitative study incorporates elements from both computer mediated discourse analysis (Herring, 2004) and digital conversation analysis (Giles, 2015) to analyze tropers' discussions on the Trope Launch Pad, a forum for DMC regarding proposed tropes and their definitions. Results determined that input from the trope's original poster (OP) appear to influence the time span of conversations, though other participants may still comment and respond to each other without the presence of the OP. A number of participants may post in multiple discussions, potentially influencing a host of new tropes. Issues of formatting and clarity are especially salient topics as tropers strive to follow the wiki rules and to produce distinct tropes with precise definitions. Participants also frequently comment to offer examples representing occurrences of the trope in media, which provide support to a proposal and demonstrate participants' understanding of what the trope entails. The Trope Launch Pad and other discussion sections of the TV Tropes wiki provide an untapped data source of DMC on a unique platform where tropers not only catalogue and discuss media topics, but intentionally collaborate to create neologisms that add to the wiki's dictionary and become enduring pieces of TV Tropes' jargon.