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)

This user subpage is currently inactive and is retained for historical reference. If you want to revive discussion regarding the subject, you might try contacting the user in question or seeking broader input via a forum such as the village pump.

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.