Author: miputkon

Description:
I'm writing this as a bug report as well as a brief request for help with my user account in the Finnish Wikipedia, fi.wikipedia. It might be that everything in the next two or three paragraphs is already well-known (I tried checking some of the other reports related to the Renameuser extension), but I guess I should write about it anyway, to explain what led to the current problems with my account. Going by the name Methem, it's a normal user account without any special priv's, created separately for fi.wiki in late 2006.

A few days ago, on May 22nd, I made a formal request for a user name change, and a bureaucrat promptly renamed my account. Soon after I figured that my former contribution history didn't transfer over. (I was later told by another admin that the priority for those histories to transfer over has been set to be low and so there may be delay.) After more than an hour, my old contributions still seemed to be under my old user name, and I thought something was wrong, so I asked if the rename could be temporarily undone. The bureaucrat tried renaming me back to my old name, and it seemed to work: I was now under my old name (Methem) and (seemingly) had my contribution history at my possession again.

Soon after that a vandal registered a user account with the new name I had wanted to be renamed to. He/she vandalized a couple of user talk pages with name-calling and sexual crap and was promptly blocked for that by the admins. I didn't pay too much attention to that particular incident at that moment. I thought that the problem with renaming (or what I *thought* was some sort of problem or a bug; the fact that the history didn't transfer over) was just temporary, or it was going to be fixed soon, or something, after which we could just get rid of the new, fake account created by the vandal and the two offensive edits and rename my own account to the new name. So I made a couple of general edits to some of the articles or things in fi.wiki and then logged out after checking my contribution history, which seemed to be fine.

I logged on to fi.wiki the next day. I checked my (Methem's) contributions and saw that most of them were gone. Only the edits made after I initially had my account renamed to the new name I wanted to use, were left. I then checked the contribution history of the vandal's account (which was and is still blocked) and saw that all of my old edits (about 10000) were there. And on top of them were the two offensive edits made by the vandal.

Now, it probably goes without saying that blocking the old/former name right after my account was renamed would have saved me from a lot of trouble.

In any case, it seems I need someone from the technical staff of Wikimedia Foundation to fix my account: mainly the contribution history, I guess. A couple of emails have been sent to the staff, but I believe they haven't been replied to as of yet. The aforementioned fi.wiki bureaucrat and another admin also suggested me to try this Bugzilla, so therefore I've now filed this "bug report" (after reading some of the guidelines). Please point me in the right direction if I'm in the wrong place.

Version: unspecified
Severity: normal