Wikipedia discourse about social media: Facebook between community and corporation

This chapter deals with the representation of and discourse about Facebook on Wikipedia. For one, this chapter sheds light on how Wikipedia’s representation of Facebook has changed since the creation of the encyclopaedic article on the matter in 2004. Additionally, this study addresses the discussion site underlying Wikipedia’s article on Facebook between 2004 and 2020. Specifically, this study focuses on Facebook as a social media platform versus Facebook as a for-profit business as negotiated by Wikipedia editors, i.e. individuals who actively contribute to the participatory web and who exhibit particular interest in Facebook – as their decision to involve themselves in debates about Facebook shows. While a considerable body of research addresses social media and social media data, this chapter takes a first step towards exploring discourses about social media. It does so by presenting a corpus-assisted discourse study of 15 years of Wikipedia debates about the prominent social media site and company Facebook. Findings suggest that initially Wikipedia editors discussed the company Facebook as synonymous with the social media site. By comparison, by 2020, the Wikipedia editors distinguish between the site and the company. They have even decided to create separate articles for the SM site and the business.