User:Tamzin/Soft clean start
This was a good way to ease myself back into editing after not having really been a full-time member of the community for 7 years. By the time I actually wrote up the rules I'd been quietly following, they had already mostly outlived their usefulness, and now I'm ready to move past them. I think I've done enough now as User:Tamzin that I don't really care to what extent I'm associated with my past two usernames. I never did much of anything bad with them—just, really, some stuff I cringe at looking back. But I think that's true of most people who started editing as teenagers.
Leaving this here in case anyone else finds it a useful model to build a return on.
-- Tamzin[cetacean needed] (she/they) 11:33, 11 January 2022 (UTC)
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I think of myself as having made a soft clean start. In October of 2020, I found myself wanting to return to Wikipedia after a lengthy absence, but realized that there were some aspects of my past editing that I wished to leave behind. I considered making a clean start, but I still wanted to contribute in areas I'd been active in in the past, and I would have felt duplicitous interacting with old friends while trying to pretend I was someone else. So I instead resolved the following: "the softest of clean starts: no change of account, no attempt to hide my past, but a request that I be judged primarily by my edits as User:Tamzin". That entailed:
- I changed my username to something unrelated to my old one.
- I disclosed on my userpage that I had edited under two previous usernames, but left it to people to look at the history if they wanted to see which. (I subsequently made this a bit less obfuscated by listing them at ../Disclosures and commitments.)
- I politely requested that people, well, allow me a cleanstart, restarting whatever judgments they had of me (positive or negative) at the time of the rename. In return I have generally avoided taking credit for pre-rename accomplishments.
- I'm not really the type to brag about tenure or edit count regardless, but to the extent it comes up, I count from the date of my rename. I have thus opted out WP:MOSTEDITS.
- If I encounter a situation where it made sense to acknowledge my pre-rename interaction with a page or area, I do. That, after all, is half the point of making it a soft clean start. This extends to referencing the age of my account in a descriptive fashion, e.g. "In the past nine years Wikipedia has changed a lot" or "I've been on Wikipedia since I was 16".
One place where this stops working is permissions requests. People reviewing such a request will always look at the totality of an editor's contributions, for good reason; correspondingly, in the context of permissions requests I will sometimes make reference to pre-rename activities.
This does not necessarily apply as strongly to off-wiki interactions.