Talk:List of web chat sites

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

[edit] Web directory?

I'm removing an (improperly formatted) proposed deletion tag added to this article by User:Ohnoitsjamie. The reason given was Wikipedia is not a web directory. It is true that this article contains a large number of external links, but it exists to provide a direct illustration of the principles discussed in the accompanying article, Web chat site. The list shows the technology each chat site uses, whether it be HTML, or custom Java, or commercial chat software like Chatspace. It also shows the affilations between sites, something very important in the world of web chat, and something that would be impossible to see in a standard web directory like dmoz. The list also provides a rough gauge of sites' popularity, making it possible, for example, for a reader of the Web chat site article to go out and compare a large, commercial DigiChat site, with a small, community-run Chatspace site, and get a better feel for the phenomenon of web chat.

It is important that the article this list accompanies is a description of an internet phenomenon, and therefore that sites that are being linked to are themselves the topic of the accompanying article. So the links given here are, by definition, relevant, even if not all of them are necessarily notable. There is precedent for this type of article in wikipedia in the List_of_social_networking_websites article, which inspired me to compile this list, and in the hundreds of other lists throughout the encyclopedia providing links to external web sites. -- Afolentes 19:49, 20 November 2006 (UTC)

[edit] High Score Ranking Embarrassment

Sorry for putting symlynX/PSYC on top of the list like that, but I made that totalreach calculation and was myself surprised that my client MTV is so big it catapulted me straight to the top. I feel a bit embarrassed about that, I just wanted to quietly join the list, but what can i do? It's the truth. Are we sure we want to keep the list by ranking? --lynX 12:19, 6 December 2006 (UTC)

I removed the MTV link for now, because I went to the site and it doesn't seem to have any chatrooms on it. If you want to add the link again, I think it should really point to a page where somebody can find the chat without a lot of trouble. I also renamed some of your other links to match the convention in the rest of the list of using simple domain names. This improves readability and makes the alexa statistics easier to verify. I think keeping the sort order is important because it's a simple, objective way of showing the relative sizes of different chat networks, even if it does have some anomalies. -- Afolentes 22:58, 6 December 2006 (UTC)

Aye. As the name of the site states the MTV EMA only take place once a year. During that week the PSYC network, turns into one of the largest webchat networks (btw, aren't webchats usually stand-alone?). The EMA was in November, apparently they have already switched back to the let's wait until next year website. So how do we define the order of relevance, by amount of concurrent users? Is the List of webchat sites limited to community chats only? Also, no comment on our discussion on Talk:Web chat site? --lynX

Sorry for changing the date in the PSYC chat entry. I use an automated set of scripts to retrieve alexa.com statistics and generate the wiki markup for the table, so the other date came from alexa. As I said in the last post, I think the alexa numbers provide a good, though not entirely reliable guage of chat network size. I think the main question is just whether or not to include the MTV link. Personally, I would opt not to include the link, as the site seems to function as more of a billboard than as a real social community. But I wouldn't have a problem with adding the link, as long as it pointed directly at a chat page, or a page that at mentions and explains the chat. If we start including links to corporate home pages that don't even mention chat, the quality of this article will be seriously degraded. I've been thinking about our discussion on Talk:Web chat site, but I've been busy, and I guess procrastinating a little on writing a response. I will write back later today. -- Afolentes 18:27, 8 December 2006 (UTC)

This is the page where the chat is active: http://ema.mtv.co.uk/ema2006/videoconsole/ Since you have automated editing the List, I leave it to you. --lynX