Does anonymity give rise to hostility?

I wonder if there is a connection between the hostility towards new contributors and the fact that most of them have no user page and therefore no visible identity. In the past I followed quite a few cases where (a) the tone of the conversation with newly registered users who had no user page was much more aggressive than with such users who created a user page within their first edits and (b) the tone became more friendly, once the new user created a user page (i.e. long-term community members got to know who was behind that account). To sum it up: Is is perhaps easier to be unfriendly with someone you can't look into the eyes? Or: Can we improve civility by inviting new users to upload a picture and write a short paragraph about who they are as part of the registration process? I'm looking forward to your thoughts.

I've heard rumors about people feeling terrorized on Wikipedia, and people using personal information against each other. As much as it's a nice thought, I see decreased anonymity as fueling the potential for personal attacks.

I made the opposite experience: on my home wiki, I participate under my real name since 2005 and never had problems with personal attacks based on the fact that people could look into my eyes. And I can't see how "inviting" people to share some information about their interests (which are quite obvious after they've made the first 50 edits) fuels the potential for personal attacks.

Moreover, a growing number of people complains (on blogs, in interviews, etc.) about the fact that Wikipedia feels emotionally cold and "misses the chance to give itself a personal face".

But aside from anecdotes and rumours – how can we measure the effects of improving the human side of Wikipedia?

Yeah, I've always been very skeptical of editors who claim they've experienced real life harassment. Especially because there are editors who are so open about their personal lives and never encounter problems.

Other personalities seem to seek out and almost enjoy conflict, even masochistically so. They are the kind of people who would lie about being harassed in real life, or would have the kind of behavior pattern that would put them at risk. Honestly, banning some editors who love to stir conflict is as much about protecting people as it is about protecting the encyclopedia. Someone always gets hurt, even if only psychologically.

Anyway, I see this idea as (at the very least) doing no harm. So long as it's voluntary.

In my own experience, a large number of people on Wikipedia misuse anonymity to act in a way they would never act if everybody knew who they were. I acknowledge that for some people anonymity is important (e.g. users writing in topic areas that reveal their sexual orientation; people using their work time to write Wikipedia articles). But after being a Wikipedian for nearly four years now, I've come to the conclusion that the bad side of anonymity and sockpuppetry outweights by far the good side.

So, how about improving the registration process and testing the new feature for 2–3 months? E.g. Five out of ten users get an invitation to create a user page and upload a picture; afterwards, we track how many of them got involved in conflicts with other users (compared to the group of users who were not invited to do so).

Any other ideas how to measure success?

That's actually a pretty direct way to test it out, and it makes a lot of sense. Just make sure we test the pilot group against some kind of control group (I think that's what you meant). We can probably understand a lot about their experience from watching their activity at different types of pages (article space, talk space, project space), and particularly pay attention to their involvement in Wikiquette Alerts and what not.

I agree with Frank's general assessment: that there is some kind of correlation between civility and community members knowing one another.

For community members to post some information about themselves does not require that they expose themselves to attack. There are many different ways to represent oneself.

Like Frank, I have used my real name on Wikipedia and nearly every Internet-related community for the past several years, and have found it empowering and positive, almost without exception.

Other Wikimedians choose not to reveal their names, but post brief essays about their interests, their goals, or the kind of work they do off-wiki.

I believe there's a lot of promise in developing strategies that encourage Wikimedians to put a bit of effort into introducing themselves to the community.

Here is a page that may be of interest: w:Wikipedia:WikiProject Oregon/Introductions