DISAGREEING in Wikipedia to negotiate the concept of sustainability

The concept of sustainability is one that encompasses a wide semantic range. For example, the authors in the discussions on Wikipedia, which is used around the world, negotiate its conceptual content intensively and, at times, controversially. In order to demarcate the conceptual content, the authors challenge what they consider to be inadequate descriptions by rejecting the corresponding aspects as incorrect to varying degrees of explicitness and linguistic awareness through the act of negation. Consequently, authors in Wikipedia discussions perform the reflexive, communicative practice of disagreeing for the purpose of shaping the concept of sustainability. This paper uses a corpus from the discussions on the German Wikipedia articles 'sustainability', 'sustainable development', 'environmental protection', etc. to identify tendencies indicating which aspects of sustainability are typically the subject of disagreement, and therefore warrant particular consideration as controversial.