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What makes Wikipedia amazing is that it reflects a form of intellectual democracy that actually works. Although many scholars would be loath to admit it, Wikipedia is often the first professional site they visit to learn about a new topic. It is also a rich source of language data for someone interested in how groups work. In fact, it so intrigued one of my graduate students, Yla Tausczik, that she enlisted the help of the University of Texas at Austin’s supercomputer team to download all of Wikipedia, including the behind-the-scenes conversations—a nontrivial task, I might add.

For starters, Yla identified about a hundred American cities that had relatively extensive Wikipedia entries. The cities were all midsized, ranging in population from about 500,000 to 1.5 million people. Each city’s site had been edited multiple times by at least fifty different people over several years, so that there had been lengthy discussions concerning the entries. In addition to the articles themselves, each entry had gone through a review process. Indeed, all articles are categorized by Wikipedia along a continuum from “stub” (meaning not worthy of even being called an entry) to exemplary.

The degree to which the various editors used similar language in communicating with each other reflected higher-quality articles. Just as in the lab studies, teams of Wikipedia authors and editors who are in synch with each other—as measured by their similar use of stealth words—produce the best, most authoritative articles. Language style matching in the real world reflects better real-world products.

EVEN LARGER REAL-WORLD GROUPS: COMMUNITIES AND CRAIGSLIST

If we can examine the cohesiveness and interconnections of a changing group of editors on Wikipedia, why not look at real communities? Some towns are more tightly knit than others. Most of us have occasionally visited towns or neighborhoods where people appeared to be remarkably similar in their opinions, food preferences, and social behaviors. In others, virtually no one seems to know their neighbors or has a sense of the history or values of their community.

The Wikipedia project hints that it might be possible to assess the connections between people by simply measuring how people in a community use language. Another amazing Internet development has been the growth of the site Craigslist.org. In most U.S. cities, Craigslist allows people to buy, sell, and give away a large number of goods and services. The ads themselves are free and people can write as much as they like and even include pictures. The demise of many American print newspapers has been attributed, in part, to Craigslist in that people are more likely to sell their cars, rent their houses, or give away their puppies on Craigslist than use paid classified advertisements in their newspaper.

In 2008, my students and I saved copies of all Craigslist ads in thirty different midsize communities across the United States. Because there are so many categories of ads, we only looked at ads for cars, furniture, and roommates. Within each category, we analyzed between six thousand and ten thousand ads and evaluated how people in the different cities used function words. More specifically, we were curious how similarly different communities used pronouns, prepositions, articles, etc.

The results were fascinating. In several of the communities, people tended to write their ads using the same language style as their neighbors. In Portland, people generally wrote in a personal style with a slight negative emotional tone. People in Salt Lake City, on the other hand, were exceptionally upbeat in their ads. Although Craigslist writers in Portland and Salt Lake City may have had distinctive styles, within each city, people were thinking about their ads in the same ways. In contrast, residents of Bakersfield, California, and Greensboro, North Carolina, were much more scattershot in their writing styles—meaning some people may have been very formal in their writing and others very informal. They simply didn’t speak with one voice.

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