Effects of Anonymity on Comment Persuasiveness in W ikipedia Articles for Deletion Discussions (2020)

Abstract: It has been shown that anonymity affects various aspects of online communications such as message credibility, the trust among communicators, and the participants’ accountability and reputation. Anonymity influences social interactions in online communities in these many ways, which can lead to influences on opinion change and the persuasiveness of a message. Prior studies also suggest that the effect of anonymity can vary in different online communication contexts and online communities. In this study, we focus on Wikipedia Articles for Deletion (AfD) discussions as an example of online collaborative communities to study the relationship between anonymity and persuasiveness in this context. We find that in Wikipedia AfD discussions, more identifiable users tend to be more persuasive. The higher persuasiveness can be related to multiple aspects, including linguistic features of the comments, the user’s motivation to participate, persuasive skills the user learns over time, and the user’s identity and credibility established in the community through participation.

## introduction in communication, people can be motivated to achieve anonymity or identifiability based on multiple reasons, and the desire for being anonymous or identified depends on the specific communication context @xcite . anonymity is "the degree to which a communicator perceives the message source is unknown and unspecified" @xcite . it is a continuum from fully identifiable to fully unidentifiable @xcite . anonymity can be constructed by the absence of identity information or by providing a fake identity through the use of pseudonyms @xcite . the online space affords people with multiple ways to remain anonymous: visual anonymity by the lack of physical cues, disassociation of online identity from real-life identity, and the lack of identifiability that can link users to their real identity @xcite . the anonymity that people construct can be categorized as physical anonymity where there is no visual or physical presence of the source and discursive anonymity where a message does not disclose personal information that can be traced to a certain source @xcite . in addition, it can be classified as self-and other-anonymity depending on whether the anonymity is perceived by the message source or the message receiver. a message receiver perceives different levels of source anonymity with different amount of identification knowledge available, interaction history with the message source, the receiver's perception of their own anonymity, and the communication context @xcite . previous studies suggest that in certain online communication contexts, anonymous messages can hurt trust and lower credibility, accountability, and social appreciation (e.g., @xcite . these communication factors can in turn affect message persuasiveness (e.g., @xcite . however, prior studies have not directly established an empirical relationship between anonymity and perceived persuasiveness in online communication. the effects of anonymity on communication and participation behaviors are found to vary in different communication contexts @xcite @xcite . one prior study shows that anonymity can motivate users to participate in online communication as it potentially opens up freedom for people to express unpopular or ## methodology our literature review suggests that anonymity affects various aspects of online communication. we also identify related findings to the focal interest of this study -the effects of a participant's anonymity on the perceived persuasiveness of one's messages in online discussions. for instance, as mentioned earlier, messages made in an anonymous setting are found to be less persuasive @xcite . prior research also shows that the communication context mediates this influence (e.g., @xcite . we speculate that in online discussions, anonymity's influence on one's perceived persuasiveness is also mediated by the discussion context. yet, to our best knowledge, this has not been explored. additionally, while prior research has shown that a message's persuasiveness is reflected from the language use @xcite , it is unknown to us whether and how one's anonymity is related to the individual's language use in online communications. furthermore, the effects of anonymity on the message's persuasiveness are explained by their influences on accountability and credibility @xcite @xcite . it is however not clear to us whether anonymity motivates people to participate more in online discussions thus more motivated to make persuasion attempts towards others. in this study, we examine anonymity in wikipedia's article for deletion (afd) discussions. we operationalize anonymity as the amount of personal information a wikipedian discloses in the community. we aim to understand how the choice of being anonymous or identifiable in wikipedia plays a role in how a user constructs their comments and in turn their persuasiveness perceived by others. in this section, we detail our study to explore these issues. ## discussion our results show that in wikipedia discussions, persuasive comments, i.e., those express congruent views with the final decision, are made more often by identifiable users. these users also participate more actively in the discussions. this is inconsistent with the findings of @xcite experiments in which anonymous participants were found to be more actively participating in the online discussion but less persuasive. in wikipedia discussions, participants share a common identity as wikipedians in the community and conduct collaborative work @xcite . motivated to be associated with the community, the members' active participation helps them establish and maintain their identities with the community. in addition, wikipedia encourages non-anonymous participation @xcite . apart from the fact that more disclosed personal information makes one more identifiable in the community, one's participation in various wikipedia activities is connected to the collective goal of the community and reflects one's identity in wikipedia. the higher participation level makes an additional contribution to establishing their identity, credibility, and reputation within the community and decreases perceived anonymity of the message receiver. wikipedians may also learn to be more feature persuasiveness voting comment count in the dataset @xmath0.251, @xmath1.01 total edit count in wikipedia @xmath2.284, @xmath3.01 length of wikipedia membership @xmath4.128, @xmath5,01 persuasivenss through their long-term participation in the community. our findings on the influences of anonymity on persuasiveness are potentially limited because our way of extracting personal information based on a wikipedian's user page text features and named entity recognition may not reflect user anonymity accurately. the classification of high and low anonymity therefore needs to be validated more rigorously. additionally, we are not able to measure how a user's identifiability is perceived by other communicators and how the perceived anonymity affects perceived persuasiveness. when measuring persuasinvess, we only consider data from discussions that have more nonpersuasive comments than persuasive ones for higher accuracy. this choice leaves users and their anonymity choice and persuasivenss in the alterative situation unaccounted for, which is worth exploring in future work. nevertheless, our study provides empirical evidence that anonymity is related to a comment's persuasiveness through linguistic and behavioral features. our finding in the wikipedia context suggests that it is a successful practice in terms of establishing credibility and reputation in wikipedia by requiring one to create and use their user accounts in wikipedia activities. it would be interesting to examine whether this applies to other online communities where peer-to-peer collaborations are the norms, and how these communities constrast with those without extensive collaborative work. our future work includes establishing a more direct relationship between anonymity and user credibility and accountability to understand the mechanisms behind anonymity's influence on persuasiveness. for example, a prototype design of asynchronous online deliberation uses the feature of voting for participants to measure the constructiveness of a message and ensure the accountability of anonymous participation @xcite . a similar mechanism can be implemented to study whether or not accountability measured in this way differs between anonymous and identified messages. similarly, the methods used by @xcite can also be used to understand the mechanisms through which anonymity affects persuasiveness. we would also like to explore in more details how being anonymous or having an established identity in online communities affects a user's motivation to participate in the community. lastly, in some online communities such as quora, a user can switch between revealing their identities and showing as anonymous when asking questions and offering answers. it will help us gain a more comprehensive understanding of users' online behavior and their perspectives regarding online identities by exploring their motivations and communication strategies in choosing these communication situations and compare their language use in the two cases. ## conclusion in this study, we analyze whether or not a user's anonymity level affects their comment persuasiveness in the wikipedia article for deletion (afd) discussions. we collect user and comment data of the discussions and annotate them for anonymity and persuasiveness. in this specific context, we measure anonymity by the amount of personal information disclosed in their user page using named entity recognition and other linguistic features. message persuasiveness is measured by the degree to which a message can lead to an agreed group decision on the focal wikipedia article. we also analyze the relationship between anonymity and the linguistic features of a user's comment and the user's participation in the community to understand how anonymity is related to persuasiveness. our findings conform to what has been suggested in previous research: a user's message persuasiveness is related to his or her anonymity status or level of identifiability in the community. in wikipedia afd discussions, users of lower anonymity are are more persuasive and participate more in the community. our finding suggests that the higher persuasiveness can be related to multiple aspects, including linguistic features of their comments, the user's motivation to participate, the persuasive skills acquired over time, and the user's identity and credibility established in the community through prolonged participation. the results shed light on how anonymity affects communication behavior and communication results in an online collaborative community. we also suggest multiple perspectives for further research including closer examinations of the relation between anonymity and accountability or credibility, anonymity and participation in online communities, and comparative studies on other types of online communities.