Friday, May 13, 2005
READ ME: the purpose of this blog
As explained on our main blog, the Harvard Plagiarism Archive, the function of this companion HPA Tips and Comments blog is to make it easy for our readers to submit totally anonymous tips.
We got the idea for using the "anonymous comment" feature of a blog to facilitate anonymous comments from this New York Times story about the value of that feature for dissidents at the Los Alamos nuclear weapons laboratory.
We figure if the ability to make anonymous comments can help straighten out matters at a super-secret research facility like Los Alamos, it might play a role in helping straighten out matters at a super-secret educational facility like Harvard.
For technical information on the anonymity of such posts, see here, referenced on the Los Alamos blog here (under the right column sidebar links, "How to Post Anonymously").
There is no need for readers of the Harvard Plagiarism Archive to check his blog for content. Its only purpose is to provide a convenient vehicle for anonymously commenting, without cluttering up our main blog with comments. To underscore this point, we will be regularly taking tips and comments off this blog, and deleting them, probably every day or two. To avoid possible libel and intellectual property issues, we will remove all tips and comments at once, on a regular schedule. That is, we will not be exercising any editorial control over the content of the tips and comments. For example, we will not be leaving up some comments longer than other comments because we might agree with them more than we agree with other comments, and we will not be taking down some comments more quickly than others because their content might offend others.
Although we will be regularly deleting comments off this blog, keep in mind that any comment you post can be read by anyone who visits this blog between when you post and when we next delete comments. Therefore, if you have a tip or comment that you don't wish to share publicly, please e-mail us at AuthorSkeptics@hotmail.com. If you are concerned about anonymity, you may wish to create an e-mail account under a pseudonym to use solely for communications with us, and do so using an e-mail service which may be more conducive to anonymity than others, such as FastMail or Hushmail and/or an anonymizer service. We make no effort to identify those who e-mail us anonymously, but taking such steps might ease your mind regarding your ability to communicate with us anonymously if that is your wish -- even though we have long had a strict policy of not identifying anyone who e-mails us without their explicit consent, and many people have e-mailed us on that basis.
Although the primary purpose of this blog is to permit people to make anonymous tips and comments, when you make a comment you will be given the option of including your name and e-mail address. So those who wish to conveniently leave comments (that is, without the bother of sending an e-mail) using their real names and real e-mail addresses, or a pseudonym and an associated e-mail address, should go ahead and do so. However, in doing so, please state whether, if we reprint or reference your tip or comments, we are free to use the name you provided, and the e-mail address.
AuthorSkeptics
"Helping ensure Harvard plagiarists face the music, since September 2004"
