Talk:Web community

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This should be merged with online community, which should be separate from virtual community (which needs a ton of cleanup itself), but all of that is too big a project for me to contemplate. Dreamyshade (talk) 09:37, 19 March 2008 (UTC)

Strongly disagree on the merger. I agree that the article is a lame stub, but I disagree that it should be merged into virtual community. The two are fundamentally different:

(a) virtual community is about interpersonal relationships online. Howard Rheingold's The Virtual Community (rev ed, 2000) is an exemplary discussion, although the concept was around earlier. Typically, it is studied through ethnographic observation or surveying

(b) A web community (as the definition says here) is about inter-web page relationships, a fundamentally different thing. (The pages might be corporate for example.) Duncan Watts' research is the exemplary discussion here. Typically it is studied through bots discovering linkages and structure in the web.

Bellagio99 (talk) 12:39, 5 June 2008 (UTC)