Wikipedia:Right to vanish
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The following is a proposed Wikipedia policy, guideline, or process. The proposal may still be in development, under discussion, or in the process of gathering consensus for adoption. References or links to this page should not describe it as "policy".
A proposal's acceptance or rejection is not determined simply by counting votes. |
Users in good standing who have stopped editing Wikipedia, 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 Wikipedia:Changing username. [1]
There is no guarantee provided by the Wikimedia Foundation in the privacy policy that a name will be changed on request. This policy should not be used to assist users who have been abusive or disruptive, who left when they lost the trust of the community, or who have been banned.
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[edit] 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:
- 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 Wikipedia:Changing username).
- Change references to your former username to be referenced to your replacement username (you can do this yourself).
- 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;
- Add a brief note indicating that you have left Wikipedia 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 Wikipedia cannot make any guarantees.
See right to vanish (meatballwiki)
[edit] 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 about those who merit an encyclopedia article, when in the encyclopedia article, is not included in this.
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.
[edit] Exceptions
The right to vanish does not extend to pages retained for the purposes of protecting Wikipedia against disruption; for example requests for arbitration, requests for check user, or sockpuppet categories.
[edit] Notes
- ^ The user must have made fewer than 200,000 edits. This is a technical limitation in the rename tool, not a policy limitation.
