Help:Merging communities

Sometimes, when two user communities cover the same subject matter and share similar contributors, they may wish to merge their communities to push their efforts forward in one direction.

What Happens When You "Merge" Wikis?
While joining forces is a great idea to make a community more successful, using the term 'merging' is incorrect. There is not just one button Wikia can push to make two communities suddenly become one community. This is both due to the technical limitations of MediaWiki software, the unique way Wikia user tables are configured, and the fact that two wikis may have pages with the same name but different content (for the technically-minded, a "collision").

There are more limitations to consider, such as viability and community harmony. Please read this Wikia policy page for more information on whether or not a community merging is a good idea.

However, Wikia can offer a different version of "merging", the steps of which are documented below. Note that the word 'merger' is used very differently on Wikipedia and do not apply to wikis.

Steps A Wiki May Take To Combine
You can use Special:Export on the wiki that will be closed and redirected and then use Special:Import to move them to the wiki being kept.
 * 1) Secure both admin & community support on both wikis for the merger.
 * 2) Decide upon which current wiki URL & site should wind up as the "new" site. Usually, it is advisable to pick the wiki with the most articles or has a higher SEO ranking on Google.
 * 3) Move any articles from the site that was not selected to be the wiki URL to the site that was.
 * 1) Go to Special:Contact and explain the situation to staff. Assure them you have moved all critical pages onto one site.
 * 2) Wikia Staff will then close the other wiki and redirect the URL to the other URL.
 * 3) The communities will now be under one Site Name and URL.