Matias Pelenur wrote:
A user on my MediaWiki site would like to change their username. Is that possible, or better yet, possible and not too hard?
I'm guessing that the value in the user.user_name column for the user would have to be changed, and also the title of User page name. Hopefully any other references use the userid? Would pages have to be rebuilt?
There's a helper script for this in the maintenance directory: changeuser.sql.
Set the oldname and newname variables at the top to the old and new names (use spaces, not underscores!) and run it through the mysql command-line client or phpmyadmin or whatever you've got to run SQL scripts into.
It's a little ugly, but it works (has been used on Wikipedia a number of times.)
I'd recommend backing up your database before running any manual scripts in case you make a mistake; SQL can be unforgiving!
-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)