The concept of translation in Wikipedia

Wikipedia is a resource for researchers due to its collaborative and disruptive characteristics, but it can also be a source of information on what the most widely held views on a topic are. This study looks at the entry for “translation” in Wikipedia in all the languages available in January 2015. Those entries are first categorized with respect to size (measured in bytes), activity (level of activity in 2014) and assigned quality labels. Discussion pages are then analysed to isolate any specific problem (vandalism, publicity and thinkgroups) and a content analysis is carried out to evaluate what features of translation are most frequently commented on in the wikis. The collected data is analysed in order to find out which ideas may be intrinsic to a global idea of translation, and which are more language-specific. The results are compared to the current situation of the translation industry and translation studies.