<aside> 📚 See our other Guides and Manuals: Get the Most Out of MuckRock and DocumentCloud for more tips and tricks on getting the most out of MuckRock tools. And if this was helpful to you, consider making a donation to support our work!

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Cleaning up duplicate accounts?

Our newsroom has been on MuckRock and DocumentCloud for a very long time. A fair number of users over the years have forgotten their username and just created a whole new account. We’d love to clean some of those out, but we don’t want to make a mess.

Any user can upload documents (DocumentCloud) and file records requests (MuckRock) with their own account, or under the umbrella of any organization they belong to. If someone is removed from an organization, any public documents they uploaded under the organization’s umbrella will stay credited to the user, but the original uploader will not be able to delete, edit or deface the document. Any documents they uploaded privately will still be controlled by the user who uploaded them.

Removing a user from any one organization will not impact documents they have uploaded or any metadata attached to those documents (eg. notes or tags). It may impact who can view or edit those documents:

• Documents that were private to the user will remain accessible to that user.
• Documents that were shared with the rest of the organization, but are not fully public, will remain available to the user, and to the organization. Members of the organization will be able to edit or annotate the document, or change ownership of the document.
• Documents that were made public will remain public. They will remain attributed to the user, but only members of the organization will be able to change the documents status or ownership, or make other changes to the document and its associated metadata.

Documents can also be included in shared projects — and projects can be shared by users attached to multiple organizations. When a user is removed from an organization, they may still be part of individual projects. Don’t hesitate to let us know if you have questions about documents in shared projects.

MuckRock request ownership works somewhat differently. MuckRock requests are public by default. MuckRock users have the option to explicitly share embargoed requests with the rest of the organization. This is setting is off by default.

• If the user has turned this setting on, and the user is removed from the organization, embargoed requests owned by that user will remain visible to the organization.
• If the user has not turned this setting on, their embargoed requests will not be visible to the organization. Removing them from the organization will not change that.

We strongly encourage users to add email addresses to a single primary account, rather than creating multiple accounts. If you have documents or records requests under more than one user account and wish to consolidate them, we’re able to help with that, though it is not a quick and easy process.

Note: we don’t have full visibility on how Big Local or Agenda Watch handle user contributions.

Are you sure I won’t lose any metadata?

If you’re moving things around and worried about losing metadata, the Note Export Add-On will let you back up your annotations, and you can run it on many documents at once. That way you will have a backup of your annotations.