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.