If I were in their place — which I’m not — I wouldn’t support a blanket policy of refusing anonymous writers. (Of course I support whatever policy they want to promulgate; it’s their blog!) I would be looking to make distinctions on content, using those critical-thinking skills you talk about, more than stated identity. (It sounds like so far those content distinctions would have ruled out all the anonymous pieces anyway, which simplifies things, at least to date.) But hey, that’s me, and again, not my blog .

I suppose, for the record, I will happily accept anonymous guest-bloggers who have something interesting to say, if I think my blog is an appropriate forum in which to say it.

Anonymity — generally under persistent identities — has been a big deal for me. I, um, have a name that’s easy to Google for. And my last career was about interacting with — not just the public — but children. I am very, very, very skittish about posting things under my own name. Registering a domain name and joining Twitter were huge deals for me. (I have been shocked at how much I like Twitter — I knew about it early enough to have been one of the three-letter names but was sure it would be far too public for my comfort zone; held out for years.)

I don’t doubt the negatives of anonymous commenting, especially under non-persistent identities. (There are reasons Slashdot has the “Anonymous Coward” label.) But I also know that …that in our face-to-face life we know who our audiences are and can adjust accordingly, but on the internet we present to many audiences simultaneously, including ones we do not know are there. And those audiences may judge us according to standards that are not the standards of the context in which we speak — but can nonetheless expose us to real harm. Not because we have done anything wrong, or even uncivil; merely because we, out of context, clash with their expectations.

I have friends with a lot of interesting hobbies. Let’s just put it at that. And they talk about them, sometimes quite openly, online. And I want to be part of my friends’ conversational spheres, but when I was teaching people’s children, did I want my highly-Googleable name to be associated with [redacted], [redacted], and [redacted]? No, I did not. Not because I think there’s anything wrong with [redacted] et al., but because I feared a firestorm of controversy caused by idle Googling on the part of a parent or student with a different set of cultural norms. As you can see, I approach even this paragraph with caution.

And look, I’m the low-stakes case: this only mattered to me, only resulted in a pack of students harassing me for a week or two when some spheres got crossed. And it matters to everyone online or in public life that way — we all trip up on presenting ourselves to multiple audiences, on being taken out of context, of not being evolutionarily (I think) equipped to deal with so many publics at once — but these are quotidian, low-stakes. If I were a whistleblower, if I had a point of view that needed to be advanced for the public good but I couldn’t advance without bringing down threats on myself or my family, anonymity would be a big deal.

Yes, it has down sides. Ugly ones. It also has up sides: huge ones. In areas so grey I prefer to tread lightly, to err, if I must err, by placing too few restrictions, not too many.

I really do think there is an unequal treatment of anonymous library professional writing and anonymous prose and literature. It seems odd to demand accountability for words in one and gloss over it in the other. This is why I say judge it on the merits first, consider it on the authorship second.

I think you missed the analogy. I hope that clears it up.