I appreciate your response. That does sound like a way for rhyme collectors to get around the concerns about the safeguarding the lifes and identities of informants who they meet directly with or have some non-Internet contact with through secondary sources apart from the Internet.
Yet if there are reasons why it is not advisable for people to post identifying information over the Internet, and if the conditions that make those reasons advisable doesn't change and if & when people using the Internet become accustomed to being closed about the sharing of any personal informantion, then it seems to me that that-rightly or wrongly- will have a negative impact on collecting cultural artifacts -with documentation- over the Internet. Even if you tell people that such information will not be posted, it seems that they would be unlikely to share it.
On discussion forums such as Mudcat, it is possible to engage people in conversations to elicit clarifying or additional informaton about the examples of 'cultural artifacts' that they share. I have attempted-with minimal results-to do this on my website and on another website's thread on children's rhymes that I post to: http://blog.oftheoctopuses.com/000518.php
Emailing Internet respondents who have included their email address with their submission is another strategy that I have used to gather additional information or clarifying information about examples that are submitted to my website. {Needless to say, I don't publish those email addresses or give them to secondary sources}. But for whatever reasons, few of these respondents re-contact me. And if concerns about the safety of providing identifying information on public forums and concerns about providing personal email addresses to website management becomes more widespread than it is now, it seems that fewer people may give their email addresses and/or respond to private request from that management for additional or clarifying information about their submissions of rhymes, songs, etc.
However, I hasten to say that my concerns about this topic aren't limited to my experiences with my website.
I'm wondering if any others believe that there is or there would be a negative impact to folk culture research, analysis, and informal information sharing if folks are reluctant to post or asked not to post identifying information on the Internet as was advised in that dailykos dairy whose link is included in this thread's initial post.