Simply describing what took place in that conversation would limit the value it provides to a reader. I feel strongly that using examples to support analysis is a good way to inform and convince your readers, but I agree that de-anonymizing editors (whether posting in a public space or not) could be troublesome. I'd like to break this question down into a few parts.
1. Are Wikipedia's publicly accessible pages anything other than public spaces? 2. Does bringing wide attention to editor actions cause them unnecessary harm? 3. Should/do editors assume that wide attention will not be brought to their editing actions?
On Mon, Oct 25, 2010 at 10:12 AM, Milos Rancic millosh@gmail.com wrote:
You can still describe [your] point of conversation without quoting them, while leaving the conversation inside of the extended materials of your work, available on demand. If it matters, of course.
On Mon, Oct 25, 2010 at 16:33, Ziko van Dijk zvandijk@googlemail.com wrote:
Hello,
I may not have make clear what I mean. In the humanities, you often have to quote conversations. But when I do, I reveal automatically reveal who said what, even if it is not important for me what was said exactly by whom. Wikipedians tend to dislike these quote, because they can be used to name and shame, and bringing up old disputes, and maybe reveal the real identity when done at a large scale.
For example, I copied a piece of conversation here, and replaced the user names. Still, it is easy to retrieve the original conversation with the Search.
Kind regards Ziko
Surely this is just self promotion? I have seen othger articles about websites be delted as they are regarded as self-promotion. —UserA
The article tries to be balanced and neutral, and provide facts about the project and a summary of criticism directed at it without prejudice. How well it achieves this is of course open to interpretation – UserB
I'm very surprised that anyone would think Wikipedia shouldnot have an article on itself. Imagine that someone wants to read a summary of this project. How would they do it? They would have to go through thousands of help pages, which is impossible. So they can come to this article and have the project explained in one place. The article has to be unbiassed of course and point out the flaws of the project as well as the strengths. As someone said elsewhere, you would surely expect to find the word "dictionary" in a dictionary so I would expect to find Wikipedia in Wikipedia! -UserC
2010/10/25 Milos Rancic millosh@gmail.com:
On Sun, Oct 24, 2010 at 21:30, Ziko van Dijk zvandijk@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.
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-- Ziko van Dijk Niederlande
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