erinaceous' Proposal:

I (erinaceous) propose that the board agree to individual members allowing their posts to be added to the American National Corpus, in order to further language scholarship and research (and not incidentally make it easier to get ‘foamy’ in the dictionary).

Information on the ANC is here; [link]

How will it work?

First of all, only currently closed threads will be eligible for the ANC. Which ones, yet, are not determined, but most likely Natter, Music, and the Show/Spoiler Threads. Bitches will not be one of the threads (too much personal info). Unamericans/Canadians will not be included, either (supposed to be for American English). FanFiction and San Sacre will not be included (too hard to separate fiction from nonfiction).

Secondly, individual posters have to opt in by sending me an email, the text of which is below (linky goodness should also happen here), giving permission. You do not have to use your real name to give permission, only your user name.

Thirdly, I (erinaceous) will be doing the stripping out of non-opt-in-ers, so no UnBuffista eyes will see the data until posts from people who don’t want their posts included in the ANC have been removed.

Fourthly, the posts, once in the hands of the ANC, will be further anonymized: all screen names and personal names will be replaced by tags that say "SCREEN NAME" and "PERSONAL NAME", essentially.

The posts will be part of a 200 million word corpus of American English, used mainly by language researchers and lexicographers to figure out how people actually write and speak. It’s difficult to get online material that is both reasonably good English (although of course I think the Buffistas are more than reasonably good writers of English!) and organized enough to be of value. Contributing your posts will help to advance language research in the U.S. a great deal.

TEXT OF PERMISSION EMAIL: By submitting this e-mail, I, _______________ (user name), hereby grant to the American National Corpus Consortium (ANCC), a worldwide, perpetual, royalty-free license to use, reformat, reproduce, and distribute through the Linguistic Data Consortium of the University of Pennsylvania, in electronic form or any and all media hereinafter developed, my anonymized posts to the Phoenix Board/Buffistas.org as part of a collection of American English-language material. I agree to the terms of use (outlined here: [link] and understand that the collection will be made available to others for the purposes of linguistic education, research, and development.

Betsy is a big ol' ditz who didn't realize the proposal was already seventeenth or it wouldn't be in Lightbulbs.

Just a thought that occured to me -- this board is public, so theoretically anyone could download our threads for anything, without us even knowing. So it seems to me like a bonus (of course, I'm sure it's also in line with professional ethics) that they're even asking.

I like that our names are going to be taken out; that removes my discomfort. (I mean, I know that's a silly reaction, but...)

FYI, our rules state four days of discussion followed by three days of voting. That means voting should start sometime on Friday. Erin should decide the exact time. Folks can suggest changes to the proposal here up until the voting starts, but the final decision on whether to include the changes is Erin's.

If this passes, I'd like to suggest that the "permission email" be done using a form here at b.org. It's very easy for me to set up something that will only be accessable to logged-in users. The form would send an email that automatically includes the users' email and board name. The advantage to erin is security. She'll know that she's not receiving any spoofed emails.

seventeenth

Betsy said seventeen!

I'd love to count the votes.

Word to what Jon says, about the individual permission being something that could be done as a web page on b.org for ease-of-permission-giving. More people will opt in the easier it is to do so, right?

I haven't heard any objections to this proposal, but don't let that stop anyone from voicing them. Making it double-approved -- board-voted, and then individually opted-in -- feels nice and safe to me.

If this passes, I'd like to suggest that the "permission email" be done using a form here at b.org. It's very easy for me to set up something that will only be accessable to logged-in users. The form would send an email that automatically includes the users' email and board name. The advantage to erin is security. She'll know that she's not receiving any spoofed emails.

Yes, please, thank you! The ANC was very concerned about spoofed emails. Jon, I'll send you an email address just for this, 'kay?

Making it double-approved -- board-voted, and then individually opted-in -- feels nice and safe to me.

I really wanted this, because I feel that we all own the space of B.org. Letting people include their posts without the permission of the board as a whole seemed a little too "I'm gonna take MY marbles over here!" to me ...

It's fantastic. And, silly me, I'll probably vote for the proposal and not opt in myself. So I'm glad for the double protection.

A couple of questions.

1) What do we do about quoted text? That is, if a non-opted-in user is responded to and quoted by an opted-in-user, will that text be stripped? Because since quotes tend not to be specifically attributed here, it could be really really difficult to do this.

2) Will all personally identifiable information be impersonalizated, or just user & person names? I'm thinking about locations, addresses, directions, companies, phone numbers, etc. I don't think we have too much of the latter few, but still.

I would say that quoted text should just be stripped out. It would be way too difficult to try to go back and attribute everything, and if it's from someone who opted in, then it would be there in the original post anyway.