Dear All,
I am currently engaged in conducting research on Wikipedia users' information behaviour and especially the information sources and services used in contributions.
The purpose of this survey is to map information sources used in writing and editing Wikipedia articles. The survey is a part of the research project "Information service 2.0" conducted by myself (Department of Information Studies, Åbo Akademi University, Finland) as a part of the Academy of Finland research project "Library 2.0 - a new participatory context".
The individual answers will be processed strictly confidential, the data will not be handed over to any third parties or to non-academic use and all informants will remain strictly anynomous.
Survey URL http://survey-3.istohuvila.fi/index.php?sid=62924&lang=en
More information about the project may be found at http://www.istohuvila.fi/library-20 http://www.library2pointoh.fi
Best Regards,
Isto Huvila
On 3/13/08, Isto Huvila isto.huvila@abo.fi wrote:
The individual answers will be processed strictly confidential, the data will not be handed over to any third parties or to non-academic use and all informants will remain strictly anynomous.
Personally speaking, I found it jarring that you ask for the exact name of the article to which the respondent contributed, in an "anonymous" survey. For me, for example, frequently I am the only contributor to the articles I edit, so all "anonymity" is lost. Perhaps that was your intention, but it seemed odd. So I stopped at that point.
Steve
Complete anonymity is a very high standard. This is honor system anonymity. He told you it's anonymous because he's going to protect your anonymity in the data analysis. Do you consider your IP address to be personally identifying information? You should - it's not anonymous at all. Yet, by navigating to his survey you gave it to him. Had you ever edited Wikipedia using your IP address (even by accident) he could have easily determined your actual user based on editing patterns.
This was demonstrated recently with the Netflix Prize. Netflix went to some length to anonymize the dataset, but by cross linking editing patterns across services the researchers were able to deanonymize a good portion of the dataset.
"How To Break Anonymity of the Netflix Prize Dataset" http://arxiv.org/abs/cs/0610105
So I find your concern unwarranted.
Cheers, Brian
On Sun, Mar 16, 2008 at 6:39 PM, Steve Bennett stevagewp@gmail.com wrote:
On 3/13/08, Isto Huvila isto.huvila@abo.fi wrote:
The individual answers will be processed strictly confidential, the
data
will not be handed over to any third parties or to non-academic use and all informants will remain strictly anynomous.
Personally speaking, I found it jarring that you ask for the exact name of the article to which the respondent contributed, in an "anonymous" survey. For me, for example, frequently I am the only contributor to the articles I edit, so all "anonymity" is lost. Perhaps that was your intention, but it seemed odd. So I stopped at that point.
Steve
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On 3/17/08, Brian Brian.Mingus@colorado.edu wrote:
Complete anonymity is a very high standard. This is honor system anonymity. He told you it's anonymous because he's going to protect your anonymity in the data analysis.
Hmm, maybe. I distinguish between:
1) We will attempt not to collect personally identifying information about you
and
2) We will collect personally identifying information, but attempt to protect it.
If it's 1), I simply need to trust that the information gatherer is not malicious. If it's 2) I need to trust that they are competent.
Not that it's really important - my editing record is public, my user name is not a secret, etc. It just gave me pause...long enough to lose interest.
Steve