Topic summary

Contributing data without breaching anyone's privacy

Data & Tools › Datasets data table confounding observational data Solved

This is a generated summary. It shows the 9 most-liked posts from a topic of 72, in their original order, with the accepted answer included where one exists. It is a reading aid and it will miss nuance — the full topic is the record.

s.roosTL22 Mar 2026#3

c.amankwah, post #1: Contributing data without breaching anyone's privacy Writing it up because I had to work it out twice and would rather nobody else did. Asking about contributing data without breaching directly, because I have read four threads on it and each answered a slightly different question. The version I want answered is the narrow one: given… Go to post

Where a value is derived rather than measured, mark it. Derived columns get treated as observations the moment the file leaves your hands.

27 likes in reply to #1 5mo

m.ilungaTL2 Solution2 Mar 2026#7

m.ferrand, post #2: The opening post is the version of this I will quote in future. One addition. Reproducibility: if sharing data, include enough context (compound, dose, timeframe, method) that someone reading it understands what it represents. Happy to be corrected if someone holds better data than mine. Go to post

Date every record. A dataset assembled over two years without dates cannot distinguish a change over time from a change in who was contributing.

7 likes in reply to #2 5mo

k.chukwuTL23 Mar 2026#20

revision_history, post #8: Adding the measurement that post #5 says would settle it. Missing data should be recorded as missing rather than as zero. The distinction disappears once the file is shared and cannot be recovered. This is the sort of thing the wiki should carry and currently does not. Go to post

Contributing data without breaching sits at the boundary between what this community can usefully discuss and what it cannot, and I think it falls on the discussable side, narrowly.

27 likes in reply to #8 5mo

n.brobergTL24 Mar 2026#24

Taking post #22 at face value and following it one step further.

Second-hand on contributing data without breaching, so weight it accordingly — someone whose method I trust told me this and I have not verified it myself.

27 likes 5mo

v.klausenTL3Regular4 Mar 2026#38

Anonymisation matters even for volunteered data. A combination of region, dates and a distinctive detail identifies a person more often than people expect.

This has been discussed before and I could not find the thread, so, again.

22 likes 5mo

m.silvaTL25 Mar 2026#39

Post #36 is the version of this I will quote in future. One addition.

Independent test results are the most valuable data this community collects, and they are only comparable when the method is captured alongside the number.

22 likes 5mo

d.tammTL25 Mar 2026#48

How to contribute: if you have longitudinal data you want to add, the format is simple: date, measurement, context. Contact the maintainer of the specific dataset.

24 likes 5mo

a.eriksenTL25 Mar 2026#52

Post #48 put the caveat in the right place and I want to underline it.

On contributing data without breaching: the maintained page in the documentation commons covers the general case with citations and a review date, which is more reliable than any reply here including this one.

26 likes 5mo

il.dumitruTL26 Mar 2026#66

That is a cleaner way of putting what I was circling around.

30 likes 5mo

Read the full topic (72 posts)

This topic was referenced in

Cleaning a self-reported dataset and what you throw awayData & Tools › Datasets · 2 replies
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