Talk:Single User Login finalisation announcement/Archives/2013-12

Renaming a global account locally - what to do

As admin at de-books, I was requested to rename (2013-12-15) an arabic user. I don't know what to do:

• The "old" account was registered at 14:36, 23. Feb. 2009; the only contributions at de-books concern the renaming request.
• The requested account was globally registered at 20:12, 11. Dez. 2013 without a local account at de-books.
• The requested name doesn't seem to be registered at de-books.

By renaming the account I get the following warnings:

User $1 has been migrated to the unified login system.

Renaming it will cause the local account to be detached from the global one.

Username $2 is reserved for a global account.

Unfortunately, the both names are very similar: The only difference is an accent over the first character of the second word (read from right to left) and can recognized by high enlargement only:

• current: لطرش احمد الهاشمي
• requested: لطرش أحمد الهاشمي

Is it necessary/useful or injurious/dangerous to rename? Shall I rename or not? Or should the renaming action be done globally, not locally? -- Thanks in advance! Juetho (talk) 11:01, 16 December 2013 (UTC)

We have receive a similar request at ro.wiki and I have fullfilled the request, because:

• the user has a global account and seems to be in good standing at ar.wiki
• there is no tool to rename all accounts belonging to a global account yet (AFAIK)
• the requested name does not seem to conflict with any naming rules (using Google Translator to check the meaning)
• other similar requests (at meta, wikidata, etc) were already fullfilled. Rsocol (talk) 13:01, 16 December 2013 (UTC)

The centralauth-renameuser-merged warning arises because of the following situation: 1.) The user gets renamed on his main wiki and creates a new global account under the new name. 2.) The software itself cannot know that the old and new usernames are held by the same user, so it warns to prevent that an account which belongs to someone else is accidentally renamed to something reserved as a global name for another person. So it's no problem to rename if you made sure the requestor indeed owns both accounts (local "source" account & global target account).

However, you can deny rename requests where the only edit on the wiki is the request itself. It is utterly nonsensical to rename autocreated accounts that were never used for editing; the user should simply be advised to abandon it. See also SRUC where the user currently is too. --MF-W 21:43, 16 December 2013 (UTC)

Thanks for your advice, I'll deny renaming as an unnecessary action. -- Juetho (talk) 07:29, 17 December 2013 (UTC)