Help talk:Create a Wikimedia developer account

Page text suggestions for the leading paragraph, based on my experience:

1. Wikimedia developer account is the same as your wikitech.wikimedia.org account, it is also sometimes called "LDAP account".
2. For information on a developer account you can check the wikitech user page, as well as use forgotten password feature (t)here to regain your account.
3. You can manually connect your developer account to your (wikipedia SUL login based) Phabricator account by using the - not quite easy to find - external account settings.

You can guess what my problems were figuring out how to regain my account from 2013. Help my future selves by including these in the page. I have not done it myself since I don't know how you plan to phrase things here. --Grin (talk) 10:27, 1 March 2021 (UTC)

UNIX shell username

How does one change the UNIX shell username? - Klein Muçi (talk) 13:15, 10 December 2021 (UTC)

• @Klein Muçi: I'm not an expert, but I believe that in practice it cannot be changed because it too difficult. Here's one comment discussing it: task T260647#6475314. Instead, I would suggest creating a new developer account with the name you want and requesting the same rights the old one had.—Neil P. Quinn-WMF (talk) 16:54, 10 December 2021 (UTC)

The annoying answer to this is that you do it by creating a new Developer account and abandoning your previous one.

There is some documentation at SRE/LDAP/Renaming users about the technical bits of systems that would need to be touched to effectively rename the cn attribute of the LDAP record backing a Developer account. The shell name is the uid attribute of the same LDAP record. It is not technically impossible to change that value and then reconcile all of the external references in various related systems, but it is currently impractical due to the manual effort required. -- BryanDavis (talk) 16:58, 10 December 2021 (UTC)

I asked on the Libera channel some time after asking here and I got the same answer. I understand now. A bit sad to read that but thanks for providing a detailed answer! Do you think we need a better/less technical doc page explaining this phenomenon? I've asked around a lot before coming here and everywhere I got a similar vague answer "I'm not sure but I believe you can't." (without further explanations). Maybe that's because not many people are informed on this? - Klein Muçi (talk) 19:38, 21 December 2021 (UTC)

Remove Wikimedia developer account

Is it possible to remove a developer account, for example because a 2nd account was created although another one already existed (as in my case)? Stefan Weil (talk) 07:07, 22 September 2023 (UTC)