For many months now, I’ve been keeping track of the overuse of anonymous sources in The Times as a way of discouraging a practice that readers rightly object to. The practice continues apace — as do ever-more-inventive reasons for granting anonymity.

Laura Pearle of Farmington, Conn., wrote to me over the weekend to complain about an anonymous quotation in a Hollywood-based article about awards nominees who experience a sense of deflation after the Oscar music stops. She wrote:

I read yesterday’s article “When the Red Carpet Is Rolled Up” and was shocked to read this passage: Another spoke of an industry cocktail party that occurred about a year after her Oscar ceremony. “Nobody really had time for me — it was all about the new people,” she said, speaking on the condition of anonymity because she was afraid of looking bad. After all your conversations with editors about the appropriate uses of anonymity, this is allowed? “Looking bad” is hardly a qualification! Many people say things and “look bad” on the record, and if that’s really a concern then don’t say anything. It would be nice for the so-called paper of record to have a stricter — and adhered to — definition of what “on the record” means. If there is one thing that you can do during your time, that would be it. Removing these abuses from the paper, restoring readers’ faith in who is speaking.

Ms. Pearle’s example is one of many that readers send my way. Here’s another, from an article last fall about the excesses of family weekends at colleges:

Others find the whole thing a bit overwhelming. “It’s the weirdest thing ever,” one parent of a Middlebury sophomore told me on condition of anonymity to avoid embarrassing her daughter.

The executive editor Dean Baquet told me last fall that he was about to urge his department heads to quash such quotations, in keeping with the Times policy of using anonymous sourcing only as a last resort.

As I emphasize every time I write about this, anonymous (or confidential) sourcing is sometimes both necessary and important. These examples, though, don’t measure up.

A much more serious example of anonymous sourcing comes in a front-page article last week which began as follows:

American officials have concluded that North Korea was “centrally involved” in the hacking of Sony Pictures computers, even as the studio canceled the release of a far-fetched comedy about the assassination of the North’s leader that is believed to have led to the cyberattack. Senior administration officials, who would not speak on the record about the intelligence findings, said the White House was debating whether to publicly accuse North Korea of what amounts to a cyberterrorism attack. Sony capitulated after the hackers threatened additional attacks, perhaps on theaters themselves, if the movie, “The Interview,” was released.

It was no doubt the case that officials were saying just that, but there’s little skepticism in this article, as a reader, Brad Johnson, noted in an email. He wrote: “Did NYT learn its lesson from the Iraq WMD debacle, or is the paper back to bad habits of writing stories from whole cloth based on anonymous White House and intelligence agency officials?”

Now that the matter of who was behind the hack is coming under more scrutiny, including in The Times (though with less prominence), those kinds of questions are even more germane.

One thing is certain: Anonymity continues to be granted to sources far more often than a last-resort basis would suggest.

Commenting on the college weekend quotation, James Norton of Washington, D.C., wrote to me: “I am afraid your battle against anonymous sourcing has a ways to go if this kind of quote is allowed.”

I’m afraid Mr. Norton is right. But 2015 is another year to try to root out what some have called the “anonymice” — and the dubious rationalizations they travel with.

Postscript: I welcome reader contributions to AnonyWatch and to its more frivolous cousin, my trend-tracking Monocle Meter, where a Styles section story on tiaras as the new power scrunchies recently earned a rating of six.