User blog comment:JohnnyDaPirate/Merging wikias/@comment-8-20160331160428

It depends a lot on the wiki, on a small wiki it may be the founder and/or the admins making decisions about a merge. If a wiki is totally inactive, then staff might step in to look. On a larger one, the community might have a discussion and make the decisions.

And of course, there are two wikis to decide all this, so there can be any combination of the above!

Getting a clear decision from both communities is the first and most important step in all cases though

The first decisions to be made are which wiki you are going to close, so that you can start moving content that you want from that wiki to the wiki you want to keep

Then, as you say, there are things like whether admins/bureaucrats from bother communities keep their rights, and things like themes and navigation choices. Again, these can be decided in may ways, from just founder of one of the wikis making the decision alone (maybe because one is totally abandoned and the other has just the founder working on it), to the both communities working together to make the decision

So there is not definitive answer, it just depends on the communities and how they want to work things out :)

(By the way, this is really a forum question rather than a blog posts, have a look at our Community Highlights for examples of the best user blogs on Community Central :)