On Thu, 2003-05-15 at 16:46, Jens Frank wrote:
On Wed, May 14, 2003 at 07:10:52AM -0700, Catherine Munro wrote:
I've occasionally wondered if it's been wise to use my real name as my username, given how easily unpleasantness can arise at Wikipedia and argumentative trolls can cause trouble for real people, but if people like Brion Vibber can do so, I suppose I can too. Just for my own curiosity, would it be possible to change my username without creating a new account, and retain my watchlist etc.?
It is possible to change the username. What's difficult to change are the signatures you made to Talk:-page contributions. While the username is only one field in the database that can be easily changed by a developer, the signatures are text in the middle of an article. It would take very long to replace all those.
Old signatures can of course simply be left as is, and the user page redirected to the new name.
Requesting a user name change should not be done easily. We currently need our developers time to improve wikipedia's performance!
Well, I'd prefer not to be _inundated_ with name-changes, but I'm happy to make such changes on request from those unsatisfied with their present identities. :)
-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)