Merging and moving are two important ways articles can be changed on Wiki Simple English.
This page is a policy on the Simple English Wiki Simple English. Many people agree with it. They see it as a standard idea that all users should normally follow. When changing this page (except for minor errors like typos), please check that other people agree with your changes. Use the talk page when you are not sure or when you want to suggest a change. |
There are several good reasons to merge pages:
Merging should always leave a redirect or a disambiguation page in place of the merged place. This is often needed to see the edit history for the page the merged text came from. Even if it seems rather pointless, leave it in place. Extra redirects do not hurt anything, and are sometimes helpful. Also, other websites may have made links to the old page title, so we will want to redirect new visitors to the merged page. We do not want people accidentally making a new page at the old title, not knowing that the merged page is already there. Redirects also show up in search results, helping people who might be looking under the "wrong" title to find the page that they are looking for.
You may find that some or all of the information to be merged is already in the other page. That is fine; feel free to get rid of the repeated parts and only add new stuff. If there is no information to be added to the other page, you can say in your edit summary on the merged page (as you are turning it into a redirect) that there was nothing to be merged.
Merging is something any editor can do, and if you are sure that something should be merged, you can go ahead and do so. But if the merge is argued, you may find your merge reverted, and as with all other edits, edit wars should be avoided.
If you are not sure if merging is right, you should propose it on the pages in question. After enough time has gone by to talk about it (at least 5 days), you may do the merger, or ask someone else to.
To propose a merger of two or more pages, place the tag {{merge|(other article name)}} at the top of each page. It should look like this:
The "Discuss" link normally leads to the top of the article's Talk page.
If you know which page should stay under the same name, you can use the tag {{mergefrom|(other article name)}} on that page, and {{mergeto|(article name)}} on the page or pages that should be merged and redirected to the first page. Using these templates saves other editors time deciding how to merge, and causes all "Discuss" links to lead to the same talk page, of the first page. These templates will appear as:
and
After proposing the merge, put your reasons on the talk page and check back in a few days for answers from other editors. If there is no disagreement after five days that the articles should be merged, then go ahead and merge them.
If you can't fix up the new article, please tag the article with {{cleanup}} for attention of other editors.
On Wikipedia, usually anyone logged in can change the name of a page from its current name to a new one. This is called "moving," because the effect is as if the page has been moved. A redirect is created at its old name so that links still work.
After a move to fix a spelling error or typo, you may want to list the first redirect for deletion at Wikipedia:Requests for deletion. This usually only needs to be done in special cases.
Sometimes, you may think that a page is wrongly named for another reason. For example, "Napoleon" is more well-known as "Napoleon I of France." However, this is where a redirect would be better. Most people would not search for Marie de Rabutin-Chantal, marquise de Sévigné, but for Mme de Sevigne.
The move feature is able to move pages in any namespace (except category), and even able to move pages from one namespace to another. Cross-namespace moving is needed when a page is accidentally created in the wrong namespace; for example, moving Talk/Abraham Lincoln to Talk:Abraham Lincoln, or moving Articles for deletion/Some article to Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Some article. In some cases, new users may create articles on themselves, that they mean to be their user page.
Often, other types of cross-namespace moves will be opposed by other people, and should be discussed with other editors. Wikipedia:Simple talk is the best place for this.
Please note that pages can only be moved by autoconfirmed users who are logged in.
If you cannot rename a page, or you think that the renaming may be opposed, please go to Wikipedia:Simple talk and list it there.
If the move does not work, it is often because there is already an article at the title where you're trying to move the article. This is likely to happen if there is a history of moves from one name to another. This can be fixed by an administrator after discussion at WP:RFD.
If there is only a redirect with no history at the other name, the move will still work — the designers of the MediaWiki software saw this as a special case where nothing will be lost if a move is performed.
This article uses material from the Wikipedia Simple English article Wiki:Merging and moving pages, which is released under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 license ("CC BY-SA 3.0"); additional terms may apply (view authors). Content is available under CC BY-SA 4.0 unless otherwise noted. Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.
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