Q&A for How to Close Your wikiHow Account

If you close your wikiHow account, your username will be changed to something generic, and all your edits will be associated with that name. While you can't delete your edit history, it will become completely anonymous.

Staff can hide edit summaries. You can request this by emailing the Community Liaison with a valid reason.

No, and the answerer's username will be removed from the answer.

Many generic Q&A icons are designed to be gender-neutral and include a mix of both masculine and feminine representations. Since the identities of the answerers are anonymous, the gender of the icons is not significant.

No, only your username, email, and consent are required. Never give out your password online, as there are many scams.

Staff will usually ask for confirmation through the concerned user's talk page. Closing an account is a substantial and irreversible action so there are extra measures to prevent someone else misusing the form.

Your email address is used to verify your identity when requesting to close an account. Staff often confirm with established users through their talk pages before making such a significant change. Providing your password would not be effective since websites hash passwords, and submitting it online is not advisable.

The site's staff , as well as volunteer wikiHow:Administrators can hide a revision from public view. To make such a request, you may make an Administrator Notice Board report or contact an admin directly with the relevant revision link and a valid reason (e.g. someone accidentally revealing their personal information).

According to the article, while you can't delete a wikiHow account, you can anonymize its contributions.

This means that if the email address used for your wikiHow account (which is currently set in Settings) does not match with the email inputted in the form, the account will not be closed. It is a measure that prevents random people from getting others' accounts closed, as only you (and people with whom you have shared it) would know your email.

If someone closes their account, their username will be removed from any contributions they made, and their profile picture will be replaced with a generic one, making it impossible to identify who answered the question.

When an account is closed, contributions are attributed to a generic username for anonymity, and the user page is deleted, making it impossible to recover old information. A new account with the same username will start fresh.

Accounts are generally not "mass-closed" by staff or admins; it's likely that individual users are choosing to close their accounts for various reasons.

This is an unlikely situation, as to close someone's account the person would have to know the email address associated with it. If they get that correct somehow, staff will generally ask for consent directly from the user before closing their account.

You might delete your account if you no longer wish to contribute to wikiHow, as it's a permanent decision unlike retiring. Other reasons include not needing a test account or failing to sign the COPPA form if you were underage, which would result in account deletion after three days to protect your privacy.

You may email support @wikihow.pro for cancelling your subscription instead of filling out the form.

Immediately rollback/undo the edit. To prevent someone from seeing the information through the edit history, ask an admin directly or post on wikiHow:Administrator-Notice-Board so that the revision can be hidden. If you feel comfortable, you may also warn the vandal, but it is usually best to not "feed the troll". (Also, an admin can do that for you.)

No, you must delete the photo yourself or ask a staff member to do it for you.

Yes, you can use your email address again after deleting your account.

They can see your email address when you provide it in the form.

They do if the account is evil. Admins, Staff members, and a script account called StaffAction can close evil accounts.

The account can't be logged into anymore and the talk page will be empty. The original username will be changed to something nondescript like "WikiHowUser" with the date and time of closure, but all the contributions (comments, edits, articles created) will stay attached to that name. If the user answered any questions in the Q&A section, the answerer's name will be blank and the photo will be a generic icon.

It's in the link in step 1 of this article. Click it and you will have two options: change your username or delete your account.

You cannot mass-delete random accounts, because a wikiHow staff member will message the account owner to confirm that the user requested the account deletion.

Yes, staff will contact the user before deleting and the user has to confirm that they do want to close their account.

You can do either! If you want, you can let people know that you're taking a wikiBreak before you do it, but you don't have to.

Taking a break from wikiHow then coming back later is called taking a wikiBreak. Add {{wikiBreak}} to your user page to let everyone know that you're taking one.