Misplaced Pages

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This page documents an English Misplaced Pages behavioral guideline. Editors should generally follow it, though exceptions may apply. Substantive edits to this page should reflect consensus. When in doubt, discuss first on this guideline's talk page.

Shortcuts WP:VANISH WP:RTV

Users in good standing who have stopped editing Misplaced Pages, or who no longer wish to use their real names or a longstanding pseudonym, may arrange to have their user names changed upon request to a bureaucrat at Misplaced Pages:Changing username.

There is no guarantee provided by the Wikimedia Foundation in the privacy policy that a name will be changed on request. The right to vanish should not be extended to users who have been abusive or disruptive, who left when they lost the trust of the community, or who have been banned.

Right to vanish

If you have used your real name, or a longstanding pen name, on Wikimedia projects then in principle everything you write can be traced to that name, and thus to you, as discussed above. However, if you decide to leave Wikimedia projects, there are a few steps that you can take to weaken that connection. They are:

1. If you have made fewer than 200,000 edits, change your username to some other name, one which is not directly associated with you (see Misplaced Pages:Changing username).
2. Change references to your former username to be referenced to your replacement username (you can do this yourself).
3. Delete your user subpages; in some circumstances, you may be permitted to have your talk page deleted too; contact an administrator to request the deletion of your talk page — if you are an administrator, do not do it yourself;
4. Add a brief note indicating that you have left Misplaced Pages and asking that people not refer to you by your name.

While these measures afford a degree of protection, they will not stand up to assault from a persistent investigator, and Wikimedia projects have no control over its sublicensees, or over archiving services such as the Internet Archive or Google. Further, these actions require a degree of co-operation from the other users of the project, so Misplaced Pages cannot make any guarantees.

See right to vanish (meatballwiki)

Personal information deletion

The Wikimedia projects will delete personal information about contributors (most likely on user and user talk pages) at their request, provided it is not needed for administrative purposes, which are generally limited to dealing with site misuse issues.

Personal details typically include, but are not limited to, name, address, telephone number, instant messenger contact details, photograph, appearance, and any other clearly identifying features.

Exceptions

The right to vanish does not extend to pages retained for the purposes of protecting Misplaced Pages against disruption; for example requests for arbitration, requests for check user, or sockpuppet categories.

Notes

1. The user must have made fewer than 200,000 edits. This is a technical limitation in the rename tool, not a policy limitation.

See also

• Misplaced Pages:Changing username
• m:Right to vanish

• Misplaced Pages behavioral guidelines