Identifying self-assigned terms

[zenlan]

If someone were to come across a database some time in the future and wanted to analyse the, e.g. gender, demographics, how would they differentiate between values that were input by the subject and those input by a third party, i.e. a self-assigned value and a value assigned by another person or a machine.

[sparklingrobots]

This is also related at least somewhat to what I mention here: #26 in that there is value in knowing how someone self-identified rather than only knowing the way that term or terms later got merged with new or different identities.

[drnikko]

This is a great issue - reading this (after a bit of a hiatus) makes me feel like having a development/engineering plan for this project in addition to a data/question plan would be a good idea.