I have been following the Kathy Sierra outrage over the last days and just read Kathy's joint statement on what she feels was sexual harassment and death threats. I do not want to burn my fingers on the question if Kathy is overreacting but the case brings up another interesting question: Should online anonymity be restricted or not?

The threats against Kathy Sierra were sure not done under real names. ZDNet blogger Andrew Keen takes it as a chance to point out that the "culture of anonymity has spawned a contemporary Internet of social deviants, loonies, perverts and get-a-lifers (not to mention weird Second Lifers)" who do not anymore see the reality and other people's rights.

CEO Blogger Debbie Weil adds to that " Anonymity breeds the worst, foulest behavior in the blogosphere." while another voice from the blogosphere, Seth Godin, chimes in: "Virus writers are always anonymous. Vicious political lies (with faked Photoshop photos of political leaders, or false innuendo about personal lives) are always anonymous as well. Spam is anonymous. eBay fraudsters are anonymous too. It seems as though virtually all of the problems of the Net stem from this one flaw, and its one I've riffed on before. If we can eliminate anonymity online, we create a far more civil place."

So maybe online anonymity should be restricted and real name registration required at least with some social networking places? Cluetrain co-author and fighter for social networks, David Weinberg, joins others with a more liberal stand:

"... transparency is generally a good thing, even if it isn't an absolute. It is especially good -- in fact, it's becoming a requirement -- in those elements of the business most used to subterfuge and manipulation. (Hint: Marketing and PR.) In a culture built by open and honest conversation among customers, techniques such as astroturfing are especially despicable because they abrade trust. It's bad enough when messages from people within the business pretend to be personal when they're in fact written by the PR department or generated by marketing bots. We've learned to expect such communications to be lies. It's far worse when messages purporting to come from customers are lies because now we can't even trust one another."

I am with those saying that the problem is that anonymity is abused by those with a hidden agenda or driven by lies, who in consequence, as Weinberg says, "abrade trust". And I think that the only possible way to reform trust-based markets such as Wikipedia is to implement some minimum requirements. I can think of two:

1) Real name and date of birth needs to be registered together with a verified legal address.
2) The Terms of Service are to include a clause stating that the editor-to-be is a) not paid for any activities he is planning to do on the site and b) does not receive any other commercial advantages or profit out of him/her editing on the site and is not working for someone who does.

This would reduce anonymity in the most abusive places.

Sources:
http://headrush.typepad.com/creating_passionate_users/2007/03/as_i_type_this_.html
http://www.rageboy.com/statements-sierra-locke.html
http://blogs.zdnet.com/keen/?p=119
http://www.blogwriteforceos.com/blogwrite/2007/03/brilliant_blogg.html
http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2007/03/misogyny_and_an.html
http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2004/02/the_problem_wit.html
http://www.cluetrain.com/
http://strumpette.com/archives/162-Cluetrain-author-dispels-absolute-transparency-myth.html
http://www.misou.info/2007/04/kathy-sierra-hype.html

YouTube weaknesses recently became clear it was used for "a bloody war between rival Mexican drug gangs ... where two competing cartels taunt each other with blood-soaked slideshows and films of their murder victims."

This war started in January this year just now cost another victim:

"The video - posted by "matazetaregio" - opened with the message "Do something for your country, kill a Zeta!" and continued to show "a man in his underwear tied to a chair with a 'Z' and the message 'Welcome, kill women and children. Continue Ostion' written on his chest". ...

The man was seen being "interrogated" about the 6 February deaths of "five police officers and two secretaries in the Pacific resort city of Acapulco". More than a dozen men assaulted two police stations and the authorities are investigating the possibility than some of the victims were connected to drug cartels and the killings were a "settling of scores" between gangs.

The video continued to show the man beaten into confessing he participated in the Acapulco killings, at which point he is strangled by "twisting a cord tied to metal rods until the pressure cuts through his neck".

So much for the beauty of anonymous "social networking" places.

Sources:
The Register, 13 Feb 07
The Register, 02 Apr 07
Blog

Great minds produce great art. And what else could blunt a great mind better than misinformation!

In a consequent move history Professor Neil Waters of the Middlebury Art College the Vermont got his colleagues to approve a policy which bans students from using Wikipedia for their class papers: "I realized that it wasn't just a problem of citations but also that students were using it to study for exams because of its convenience--and in the process absorbing nuggets of misinformation". As the New York Times reports: "When half a dozen students in Neil Waters's Japanese history class at Middlebury College asserted on exams that the Jesuits supported the Shimabara Rebellion in 17th-century Japan, he knew something was wrong. The Jesuits were in "no position to aid a revolution," he said; the few of them in Japan were in hiding. He figured out the problem soon enough. The obscure, though incorrect, information was from Wikipedia, the collaborative online encyclopedia, and the students had picked it up cramming for his exam."

Also Roy Rosenzweig, director of the Center for History and New Media at George Mason University, blows the same horn: "College students shouldn't be citing encyclopedias in their papers," he said. "That's not what college is about. They either should be using primary sources or serious secondary sources."

Lisa Hinchliffe, head of the undergraduate library and coordinator of information literacy at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, adds that earlier generations of students were in fact taught when it was appropriate (or not) to consult an encyclopedia and why for many a paper they would never even cite a popular magazine or non-scholarly work. "But it was a relatively constrained landscape," and students didn't have easy access to anything equivalent to Wikipedia, she said. "It's not that students are being lazy today. It's a much more complex environment." When she has taught, and spotted footnotes to sources that aren't appropriate, she's considered that "a teachable moment," Hinchliffe says.

Why are students using Wikipedia at all? Just lazyness and maybe they never learned to research something on their own. "Students are responsible for the accuracy of the information they give," says Waters. "They can't say, 'I saw it on Wikipedia and therefore that shields me.'" The departmental statement at Middlebury College also forbids students from including Wikipedia in lists of bibliographic sources. According to Middlebury student Eliza Murray ('08), the burden rests with students themselves to learn the difference between credible and non-credible sources. "There are so many other, more legitimate sources to cite," she said. "Why would you cite Wikipedia?"

Sources:
www.middlebury.edu
www.schoollibraryjournal.com
www.nytimes.com
www.insidehighered.com
www.uiuc.edu
media.www.middleburycampus.com
misou.info