Wikipedia is an online encyclopedia, written entirely by volunteers in 288 different languages. It is the 6th most visited of all websites, and is both the largest and the most used encyclopedia of any kind. Both teachers and students regularly use Wikipedia as a tool, but are often unaware of its translanguaging potential.
Wikipedia itself is multilingual rather than translingual, but can nevertheless be a valuable resource in the translanguaging classroom, mainly because it contains linked quasi-parallel texts in many languages on almost any topic. We see at least three levels of translanguaging Wikipedia use:
The focus of our study is on the second point, comparison between languages. We have investigated the types of differences than can be observed between languages in articles on the same major topics, using both quantitative and qualitative methods.