Preventing Spammy User Accounts
Fragment of a discussion from Project:Support desk
I don't know about MediaWiki internal configuration for such limitation.
The user probably wanted to create a new account with better name, without knowing about account renaming.
If it's a small wiki and you know the people editing you could just ask him. Or ask on his talk page, but I agree: If this is a public wiki and ithere are no anti-spam measures set up, these two users might well be spammers.
To avoid spammers registering in your wiki, you can set up the Extension:ConfirmEdit, which comes with MediaWiki 1.18 and newer. It allows you to show your users a captcha when they register.
