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Turn taking on talk pages
Tools for analysis. Basic patterns to recognise. Could be useful for a variety of purposes, including forming the basis of automated identification of trouble-spots, and greater insights by editors in how to interact more productively. Especially true of Meta, Commons, given that there are similarities and differences in turn-taking conventions between different cultures and languages. First, what are the turn-taking conventions in English, and how do those conventions differ according to social context?

One source is [www.ameprc.mq.edu.au/docs/research_reports/I_see_what_U_mean.pdf], apparently free. Needs heavy adaptation, including exclusion of irrelevant info, and insertion of relevant info, for wiki-talk contexts: the degree to which turn-taking is cooperative, as opposed to competitive (or hostile), in different contexts


 * How speakers obey certain principles in conversation
 * Language as a medium for social control (templates ... admin posts in certain contexts ... arbcom judgements)
 * How are talk-page texts—even the most seemingly unremarkable and everyday—critical sites for the negotiation of power and ideology?
 * How do particular discourse practices act to the detriment of certain social groups and individuals? (Particularly female editors.)

Spoken vs written texts
Talk-page discussions lie somewhere between the extremes on the continuum.

Closer to spoken: They are essentially dialogic, the participants typically share knowledge of the context, the edits are generally spontaneously created, depend on immediate context for meaning, and the interpersonal aspects of language are typically foregrounded.

Closer to written: Generally drafted and edited; generally reflect on action; often have a strong foregrounding in the topic of the article.

(As language moves away in time and space from the event it is describing, it works harder to recreate the context.)

Turn management

 * the nature of preferred as opposed to dispreferred responses—but what do pauses mean on a wiki talk page? how does length/scope of a post affect the discourse?
 * the language which typically accompanies preferred or dispreferred responses—and what are preferred or dispreferred responses on talk pages? Needs to be worked out.
 * strategies within turn types; for example: repair (correcting your own words or the other writer's words); clarification which can be done through reformulating the gist or upshot of what has been said. We might list discourse strategies as:
 * clarifying
 * summarising
 * challenging
 * hypothesising

Also: apologising, requesting, promising, threatening, accepting, rejecting

Conversational maxims are derived from what Grice (1975) called the cooperative principle, which is based on the assumption that in any interaction the speaker is potentially obeying four conversational maxims:
 * be true (quality)
 * be brief (quantity)
 * be relevant (relevance)
 * be clear (manner)

• the conversational principles of politeness (Lakoff 1973) • the way cooperation and the maintenance of social relationships acknowledge that people need to maintain face in conversational interactions (Brown and Levinson 1978; Goffman 1967) • cross-cultural communication misunderstandings, assumptions and expectations—why communication breakdowns may occur (Gumperz, Jupp and Roberts 1979; Roberts, Jupp and Davies 1992; Willing 1992).

Are there marked and unmarked features?

Main post types:

Exchange of information (proposition)

Exchange of services (usually editing, sometimes research—proposal)


 * Offer to do something (offer)
 * Offer information (statement)
 * Request for information (question)
 * Request to do something (command)

Where does "proposal" fit in to the four above?


 * Proposal (preferred response: acceptance; dispreferred response: rejection ... or no response? after how long?)
 * Greeting
 * Announcement

Turn-taking
Turn taking is concerned with when and how speakers take turns in a discussion—can be aligned to types of conversation or different features of conversation. For example: • Edit-conflicts mark instances of high activity, disagreement, urgency, annoyance, or a high degree of competition for a turn. • Little competition for turns marks interactions which are more cooperatively negotiated or for which there is less intensity (less emotion? greater duration anticipated? How time-intensive, then, is a factor). • Pauses between turns may indicate a number of things. • Longer turns signal their endings by such things as pauses, laughter or fillers such as anyhow or so.

What language typically informs preferred and dispreferred responses?

Knowledge/power assymetry
On-wiki, the usual K1 and K2 are sometimes mapped over P1 and P2. Example: FAC, where reviewers might be in a position of power over a nominator, but the nominator has more knowledge. Thus, a request for information or for service (editing of the nominated article) might be made by a single editor who is both K2 and P1. This could be true sometimes in election forums, in exchanges between candidates and voters.