Board Thread:General Discussion/@comment-209674-20140225224507/@comment-366087-20140315005453

Dartmaster8 wrote: its the excessive  number of dead duplicate wikis that becomes a problem. I'm curious. What problem is that? How do any of these near-similar wikis, most of which are dead, dormant, stagnant, cause a problem for anyone?

Now, I understand those that are near clones of another. Few months back I merged a wiki(it was a spin-off clone younger than mine) with one of mine because not only were they virtually identical, right down to color-themes, but aside from one subsection format, literally the only diff was the wordmark. You could bounce between the two and lose track of which wiki you were on. With only 1 diehard editor on the duplicate, we decided to merge. Still in the post-merge mop-up to ensure no "new" information is lost.

Yeah, *cloned* wikis can be problematic, but the rest? In another case, I was thinking of merging a dead similar-topic wiki to another of my wikis, but with only 8 content pages compared to "my"* 200+ pages, I actually asked Staff to just outright close the wiki and redirect the url to "mine", which they did without question.

But *problems*? Aside from users losing track of which wiki they were on in the first instance of perfect-cloning, nothing else in all the above posts would I term a "problem". Casual searchers are *not* going to find the "excessive number" of dead wikis.