Authors are said to collaborate in making meaning when they work together to create a text, and all writers involved in the production of such a text are listed as co-authors.

Much de facto collaboration results in electronic environments when the writer refrains from elaborating a topic, choosing rather to point to other writers' elaboration by linking to their texts or pasting another's text into his or her own. Thus, the effect for the reader may be not much different from reading collaboratively written texts.

Furthermore, in the evolving text of a single listserv thread or a single topic discussed in a computer conference, the total discussion of the thread or topic is collaboratively produced, whether contributors are consciously contributing to the collaboration or thinking of their own contributions as individual, stand-alone texts.

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