Why the Homepage Doesn't Name Me

AA subject librarian asked me to add a byline. Here's the reasoning behind saying not yet.

A subject librarian recently suggested I add my name to the homepage, so visitors can identify the author. It's a reasonable thing to ask, especially from someone whose entire profession is about helping people trace a claim back to where it came from. My answer was no, for now, and the short version is that I don't want students treating this site as something to defer to because a named, credentialled person wrote it. I'd rather they saw it as a set of things to weigh, argue with, and complain to me about directly — which is also part of why the homepage already states plainly that some of it is co-authored with AI. That reasoning deserves a fuller account than a sentence in an email, including the parts of it that cut the other way.

What a name on the page actually does

AA byline isn't neutral decoration. It changes how a reader processes what follows, and the effect has been measured directly. Hovland and Weiss gave two groups of people the same article and attributed it to sources of different credibility — Robert Oppenheimer for one group, a propaganda outlet for the other. The high-credibility attribution produced more immediate agreement with identical content^[1]. Petty and Cacioppo's Elaboration Likelihood Model gives the mechanism a name: under low elaboration, when a reader isn't scrutinising the argument closely, source cues like credibility do persuasive work that the argument's actual content didn't earn^[2]. A "Dr." in front of a name, or a university crest beside it, is exactly that kind of cue. It can move a reader's judgement before they've read a word of the reasoning.source cues carry weight when we're lazy

Walton's account treats appeal to authority as a defeasible argument scheme rather than an automatic fallacy: reasonable when the source has genuine, relevant expertise and there's no stronger evidence to hand, weaker when those conditions don't hold^[3]. Credentials are genuine evidence on that account, not noise. A prominent byline is what turns them into the first thing checked rather than the last — a shortcut that works against the slower habit of actually weighing the argument.

That matters more for students than it might for a general reader, because checking an argument rather than trusting its byline is a skill, and most people are worse at it than they assume. The Stanford History Education Group tested professional fact-checkers against historians and Stanford undergraduates on judging the credibility of unfamiliar online sources. The fact-checkers won clearly, not because they knew more facts, but because they used a different method: they left the page, searched for independent information about who was behind it, and came back — a technique the researchers call lateral reading. Historians and students, reading the page itself more carefully instead, did worse^[4]. A confident on-page byline is precisely the kind of signal that rewards staying on the page. If the habit I actually want to build is leaving the page to check, putting my own credentials front and centre works against it.

What leaving it off actually costs

TheThe librarian's suggestion holds up on its own terms, too, and treating it as a strawman would be unfair to it. Named authorship is the ordinary currency of scholarly accountability. It lets a reader check a track record, follow an author's other work, and hold someone responsible when something turns out to be mistaken. A field that ran entirely on unattributed claims would have no way to build or lose trust in anyone specific, and unattributed content online is a well-known route for low-quality or bad-faith material to pass as something better. Transparency about who's behind a claim is ordinarily a trust signal, not an obstacle to one.

That tension is sharper here than it would be on a site with no stated position on honesty about process. The homepage already discloses, in its own words, that some of the material is drafted with AI assistance and that the ideas, direction, and responsibility for errors are mine. Declaring that much and then leaving my own name off the same page is an inconsistency worth naming rather than quietly stepping around: if transparency about process is worth stating, transparency about who's accountable for that process is a harder thing to argue should stop at the door.

This site isn't actually anonymous, though, and describing it as if it were would overstate the case. My name is one click away on the licence page, in the suggested attribution for anyone citing the material, and anyone who wants to check who runs the site — including, obviously, a subject librarian doing exactly the lateral-reading check described above — can do so in about the time it takes to read this sentence. What's withheld from the homepage is prominence, not identity, and the two are worth keeping separate.prominence is a choice, not a fact

A middle option: a named subdomain

OneOne way to hold both halves of this without picking a side is a separate, clearly identified space — something like pat.parslow.net — that carries my name and credentials the way a conventional academic page would, sitting alongside the teaching and topic content rather than fronting it. A reader who specifically wants the accountable, identified version of the site would have one. A student arriving at a teaching page to work through an argument would still meet the argument first. It isn't a finished decision. It's an idea I've considered and not yet built, and it's worth saying so plainly rather than describing it as settled.

Where this lands

TheThe four sources above don't actually agree with each other about how authority should work; I've drawn on all of them anyway, rather than picking the one that was convenient. Hovland and Weiss show the credibility effect is real but also that it fades as people forget where something came from, which is itself a reason to let an argument's content, not its source, be what survives in a reader's memory. Petty and Cacioppo explain when the effect bites hardest: exactly when a reader isn't engaging closely, which is the opposite of what I want from a page meant to be argued with. Walton treats appeal to authority as a reasonable move under the right conditions rather than dismissing it outright. And Wineburg's fact-checkers made the strongest practical case of all: the people best at judging whether to trust a source were the ones who didn't settle the question from the page itself.

That's the same principle the rest of this site's writing on AI and teaching keeps coming back to from a different angle: outputs, human or AI, should be evaluated rather than accepted, and an objection to a claim is a question to answer, not a credential to defer to. A byline would answer a question — who wrote this — that I'd rather a reader kept asking a different one about: is this actually right, and what would show me wrong?the site's core epistemology

How to Cite This Page

ThisThis page doesn't carry an on-page byline, for the reasons set out above, so here is the attribution for anyone who wants to cite it:

Parslow, P. "Why the Homepage Doesn't Name Me." parslow.net. https://parslow.net/topics/education-and-research/why-the-homepage-doesnt-name-me.html. Licensed under CC BY 4.0.

Read More

• How I Use AI in Teaching, and How Students Use It Responsibly — the critical-engagement principle this page extends to authorship.
• Licence — the site's suggested attribution, and where my name already appears.

References

1. Hovland, C. I., & Weiss, W. (1951). The influence of source credibility on communication effectiveness. The Public Opinion Quarterly, 15(4), 635–650. https://doi.org/10.1086/266350
2. Petty, R. E., & Cacioppo, J. T. (1986). Communication and Persuasion: Central and Peripheral Routes to Attitude Change. Springer-Verlag.
3. Walton, D. (1997). Appeal to Expert Opinion: Arguments from Authority. Pennsylvania State University Press.
4. Wineburg, S., McGrew, S., Breakstone, J., & Ortega, T. (2016). Evaluating Information: The Cornerstone of Civic Online Reasoning. Stanford History Education Group.

Graduate Attributes

Directly developed

• Critical Thinker: Readers are encouraged to weigh arguments on their merits rather than deferring to the authority of a named author.
• Reflective: Readers are invited to examine the tension between scholarly accountability and the pedagogical goal of fostering independent critical engagement.

Modelled on this page

• Researcher: Empirical studies on source evaluation and lateral reading techniques are cited to support claims about how readers process information.
• Confident Communicator: The reasoning behind a potentially counter-intuitive design choice is explained clearly to help the audience understand the underlying pedagogical intent.

University of Reading Graduate Attributes framework.