Right to vanish
Template:Other languages/Right to vanish
User accounts, once created, cannot be removed. It may be possible for a bureaucrat to change your username, but you need to make such arrangements yourself. There is no guarantee provided by the Wikimedia Foundation in the privacy policy that a name will be changed on request.
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:
- Change your username to some other name, one which is not directly associated with you (see Changing username).
- Change references to your former username to be referenced to your replacement username (you can do this yourself).
- Delete your user and user talk subpages (contact an administrator).
- Add a brief note indicating that you have left Wikimedia projects and asking that people not refer to you by your name.
You should note that while these measures afford a degree of practical obscurity, they will not stand up to assault from a persistent investigator, and Wikimedia projects has 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 Wikimedia cannot make guarantees on this matter. However, a few users have taken advantage of these kinds of measures in the past, and appear content with the results, which is enough reason for us to continue to offer this service. Note that the right to vanish does not necessarily extend to pages retained for the purposes of protecting the website against disruption.
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 reasons (which are generally limited to dealing with site misuse issues). Personal information about those who merit an encyclopedia article, when in the encyclopedia article, is not included in this. Personal information typically includes, but is not limited to, name, address, telephone number, instant messenger contact details, photograph, appearance, food tastes, political views and similar details of an individual person.