On Sun, Oct 24, 2010 at 21:30, Ziko van Dijk <zvandijk(a)googlemail.com> wrote:
There is one problem that I met several times with
relation to Wiki
research. On the one hand, it is importand to reference to one's
"primary sources", e.g. link to a sentence in a WP discussion we are
talking about. On the other hand, we want to preserve the privacy of
our users.
For example, in Leipzig a lecturer talked about a certain discussion,
and he tried to keep it anonimously because it was about the
discussion itself, not to embarass the persons. But, the anonimity was
soon destroyed by curious listeners, anyway.
Did you already encounter that problem yourself?
The best way for keeping anonymity is to present derivative work, not
source itself. It is regular part of scientific work in social
sciences. And you guarantee for the validity by your scientific
integrity, as well as by sources which you are keeping for yourself
for possible check by other scientist who would keep the sources
confidential, too.
For example, I remember one sociolinguistic research, where scientists
taped speech of one Irish community. They gathered all private data
and connected them with records. Then, they renamed subjects with
letters: A, B, etc. At the end, they made a digest record which they
are willing to show to other interested scientists just on demand, as
well if I remember well, with a kind of confidentiality agreement with
them. I think that the research is from 1970s.
So, you should combine all of the tools which you can have: derivative
works, digesting, stating that the sources are confidential, finding
other [trusting] scientist who would check your sources and guarantee
for them, too.
And, yes, sources should be handled carefully. There are just a couple
of thousands core Wikimedians and it is relatively easy to understand
who is the person from the source.