Abstract

“Charlie Hebdo Shooting” or “Attack against Charlie Hebdo”? What would be the better title for a Wikipedia article? This type of question arises every time Wikipedia community members create a new entry. Given the emblematic role of the titles, the process of choosing them is a difficult task which requires an intense collaboration process. The present study investigates the choice of the titles and focuses on the relationship between the title and the content of the article as well as the linguistic form of the title itself. With regard to the semantic appropriateness of the titles, we explore a corpus of articles on historical and recent events as well as on social groups defined either by physical or mental limitations or by their skin color. The choice of the linguistic forms is examined using entries that include foreign proper names and expressions affected by the orthographic reform of 1990 in France. The analysis shows that the collaborative construction of titles is very enriching in most cases and allows titles to attain clearer and more neutral forms that approach increasingly the neutral encyclopedic ideal.