Lanamäki, Arto, and Tero Päivärinta. "Metacommunication patterns in online communities." Online Communities and Social Computing: Third International Conference, OCSC 2009, Held as Part of HCI International 2009, San Diego, CA, USA, July 19-24, 2009. Proceedings 3. Springer Berlin Heidelberg, 2009.

This study examines computer-mediated metacommunication within two distinct online communities, Wikipedia in Finnish (task-oriented, user-administered) and PatientsLikeMe (discussion-oriented, centrally moderated). It identifies six patterns of how metacommunication interacts with primary communication and highlights the presence of specialized metacommunication genres in Wikipedia, versus the ad hoc metacommunication in PatientsLikeMe. The findings suggest the importance of both specialized and ad hoc metacommunication for online community development.