Real Name, an Anchor to the Real World

I am sorry these comments are so late. Hopefully they are still of some use to you.

General comments

I was interested in reading this paper because of the convention in some wiki of using real names, which is often stated but rarely explained or defended. (I think it is because of the situation of the first wiki, which was basically used to support the meetings of a professional group that met regularly in person.)

In your introduction you state that real names allows reputation to spread from the internet to the real world. But much of your paper describes a two-way process — where the “shadow of the future” or the possibility of real-world consequences to online activity helps to regulate behavior, but additionally pre-existing aspects of a participant’s identity, background, etc. influences their entry into and activity in an online community.

Beyond that, I think that your positioning of use of real names as a barrier to entry to a community, and the tension between community safety / policing and conservation of limited resources is effective, and well-illustrated by many of the details throughout the paper.

Specific comments

§ 1.1 and § 1.2: I was confused about the pseudonymous rooms in KW community. Is there a distinction between rooms where participants are identified by pseudonyms and rooms where they are identified by IP address? The distinction may be important since, if participants choose their own pseudonyms, they could maintain their pseudonym(s) over time, whereas IP address identifications would probably be more transient as participants log in from different networks, etc.

§ 1.3: in the situation you describe, use of real names would only help with spam if there was really a way to warrant someone’s name and/or keep them from signing up for multiple accounts. In other words, what keeps a spammer from creating a bunch of accounts under plausible-sounding yet fake names, and then abusing the trust of participants?

§ 3: this is very interesting. Part of the audience “present” in an asynchronous conversation is the set of people who could read or participate in the future, even if the conversation is transferred offline. Where do you think the outer limits of this social presence of others are? Is there a sense that a participant is writing for posterity, or just that within some timeframe (matching the typical pace of conversation in the particular community), other people will see and react to what is being written?