apologies to post here but it seems relevant. i noticed there seems to be a lot of effort in renaming and disambiguating artists. imho, this is actually good considering artist db changes are not reflected in the user's profile. pure voluntary hard work and no e-peen to show off. some actually simply renames an artist probably because of newer handle name, typos, or misreading of kanji. but what caught my attention is sometimes some taggers don't include the old artist name in the other names field. also, no wiki was made to inform subscribers (if there exist) that the artist was moved to a new tag. add the fact that the amount of posts involved might be even eligible for an alias. leaving without wikis or not including the old name might be excusable if editing a 1 or 2-day old tags, but what if the tag had been around for some time now?
and what is the more desirable practice when renaming an artist, should we reuse the old artist db record or create a new one? personally, i prefer reusing the old one so that we can keep track of its history and changes. it's part of auditing and preserves the previous contributions of other taggers i believe.