Jewish, Christian and Islamic in the English Wikipedia

Abstract

In order to study how Judaism, Christianity, and Islam are represented in Wikipedia, I use corpus linguistics tools to extract the adjective noun collocates of the adjectives Jewish, Christian, and Islamic from the 2013 English Wikipedia in order find out their semantic prosody. I then rank the positive and negative noun collocates using the logdice scores in order to find whether there is a statistically significant difference between them. In the case of negative nouns, an ANOVA test found a statistically significant difference. Pair-wise comparisons suggest that Islamic is more negative than either Christian or Jewish while there is no statistically significant difference between Jewish and Christian. On the positive side, there is no statistically significant difference between the adjectives. Intra-adjectival comparisons suggest that there is no statistically significant difference between Islamic’s positive and negative collocates while both Christian and Jewish are more positive than negative.