Nymity

There are many approaches to nymity, the combination of persistent identity, context, and reputation that shapes how we exchange ideas in discourse, and build and moderate relationships. We've experimented with a number of approaches on Wikipedia and sister projects, and the broader wikiverse has experimented with the same since the very start. It was not an accident that many wikis originally let any reader delete the page they were reading -- it was an experiment in social norms and process as much as in technical exposure of the fundamental editability of web pages to their users.

This is a description of inspirations and contexts for nymity in the world, and an invitation to add examples (w/links) that you have used or designed into your own tools and networks.

In the physical world

Many physical world events and projects choose their nymity standards to work within their planned context and use cases.

• Chatham house rules define a popular model of having a conversation that is recorded and summarized/refactored with no individual attribution
• Masquerades, most notably w:Carnival, let people "set aside their everyday individuality and experience a heightened sense of social unity".

On the Internet at large

• SecureDrop and other tools let people share documents or information, in a way that supports brief dialogue, without divulging their identity
• Tor provides a form of network anonymity which is effective enough to be widely used for some types of abuse. Their FAQ templates highlight some of they ways they have addressed this so far.

In the wikiverse

The range of nymity in the universe of other wiki projects, has included

• strong anonymity (supporting Tor / letting anyone make edits or suggestions w/o leaving a record of who they were)
• weak anonymity (leaving no public trace but letting admins and bots see enough metadata to fingerprint users)
• pseudonymity (have as many alts as you want, each one has to build up its own store of reputation with the community to gain access to higher-leverage tools)
• real-nymity (all accounts are identified with a singular persona, which can be verified against real-world identity papers).

The Wikimedia projects have chosen something in the middle: moderate social norms around limiting and declaring alt accounts; no role accounts, so that each account is operated by a single person (or their bot) over time; support for weak anonymity but with a heavily restricted set of tools and features available to anons -- even reversible things like image uploads, new page creation, and page renames being restricted to the set of 'autoconfirmed' accounts that have a minimum age and edit count.

Here as elsewhere, the decisions around what nym context to support are determined by a tension between a philosophical desire to make contribution as easy and context-free as possible, and the real problem of spam which grows as bots become cheaper to run and the site in question becomes more popular / more valuable a target for search engine optimization.