Maintenance of Discursive Topic in Student Review with Shared Authorship in Wiki Collaborative Writing

Abstract Collaborative writing is carried out with participation of writers in shared authorship. Characteristics of collaborative writing - as a group reach consensus prematurely, poor communication, and one member not seeing the other's work - generate stylistic differences and unconscious edits, which cause coherence issues. The purpose of this article is to verify the maintenance of the discursive topic in a review produced in collaboration on a wiki portal by high school students. The assumption was that maintaining the discursive topic in collaborative writing would be more laborious for the writers involved, because it requires group consensus negotiation. The maintenance of the discursive topic was verified and an interview with the group was performed for data analysis. The result points cause-effect relationship between characteristics of collaborative writing and maintenance of the topic, what impaired the production of coherence in the review.