Q&A for How to Close Your wikiHow Account

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

No. Only your username, email and consent are required. Don't give out your password for any kind of form online, as there are so 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 that it is you who is making the closure request. Staff usually ask on established user's talk pages, too, before performing such a substantial action. Giving your password would not likely help as nowadays websites hash the passwords. Submitting your password in an online form is not recommended anyway.

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).

As the above article mentions, though it is not possible to delete an account, its contributions can be anonymized.

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.

When an account gets closed, their username will be omitted from any answers they may have contributed, and their profile picture will be replaced with a generic one. So no, you can't tell who answered a question if they close their account.

When someone closes their account, their contributions are moved (attributed) to a generic username for anonymity and the user page is deleted. At this point no information can be recovered on the old username.

Staff or admins don't usually "mass-close" accounts. It's probably users wanting to close their accounts for a variety of 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.

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

They might not want to contribute to wikiHow anymore. Deleting your account is a permanent decision, unlike retiring. There are other reasons for deleting an account. For example, a user might have been using a test account that they don't need anymore, or they might have been underage and not signed the COPPA form, in which case their account gets deleted in three days to protect their privacy.

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 have to delete the photo yourself, or ask a staff member to do it for you.

Yes.

When you submit your email in the form, they will see it.

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.