Forum:Mergefrom template help

I want to know the easy way how to merge pages on my wikia site? Sundogs 01:15, 13 March 2007 (UTC)


 * Usually you just blank one of the pages (say you want to merge "Foo" into "Bar") with a  #REDIRECT Bar  and an edit sumamry like "Merging with Bar ", and copy/paste the mergable content to Bar with an edit summary "Merging from Foo ".
 * If you want to merge the histories (rarely needed unless you plan to delete one of the two pages rather than redirect it), you delete the destination page "Bar", move "Foo" to "Bar", delete "Bar" again, and then undelete "Bar". NOTE that this will restore both sets of histories by revision date, and make it somewhat confusing when checking diffs in the future (often only specific revisions are moved over). Not advised except by advanced users. --Splarka (talk) 02:19, 13 March 2007 (UTC)
 * How would you merge only certain revisions. Which would mean splitting page histories. I can't think of a way to do that. Because a default functionality of move which only moves undeleted revisions could have a very, very bad outcome. That would only work with a special sysop checkbox to split. Compared to that, merging page histories to fix cut&paste mistakes is easy. 06:36, 13 March 2007 (UTC)


 * You just leave the chosen revision, that you don't want, as deleted when undeleting. --Splarka (talk) 07:27, 13 March 2007 (UTC)


 * Then doesn't that mean that if something is deleted all the deleted revisions stay under the same name even when a normal user uses the move page function. What if some old revisions of a page were deleted and the page was moved. Then wouldn't the deleted revisions become lost and not be found if someone went back to look for any revisions that may need restoring. 08:52, 13 March 2007 (UTC)


 * These reasons and possible confusions (as well as many others) are why it is for advanced users only. Read: so don't do it. --Splarka (talk) 21:53, 13 March 2007 (UTC)


 * I get how to do it and everything. But I'm talking about normal actions being taken and causing problems. For a hypothetical example. We'll come up with one with the Narutopedia as the subject. Community has article at w:c:naruto:Uzumaki Naruto. Some revisions are deleted because they use content that breaks the GFDL. Community later moves the article to w:c:naruto:Naruto Uzumaki on it's own. Then because the old revisions were left at Uzumaki Naruto they may not be able to be found if the community finds a different way to deal with the content that was deleted. I'm not talking about confusion made by using merge and split. But normal actions made by a community which accadentaly causes a side effect of the split system which few people actualy know about. The community could split an article without knowing that the split feature exists. Now that I think of it, I may have lost some of the Main Page revisions on the gaiapedia when we switched from Main Page to Gaiapedia and later to The Gaiapedia. But the split feature does give me an idea as to how to deal with some revisions which should never come back. Probably not going to use it all that much, but it's possible to use a set of useless article titles as voids for stuff. Namely horible vandalism that the community dosen't want to be accadentaly restored. 09:38, 14 March 2007 (UTC)


 * What you mention is already done sometimes by advanced vandal fighters on Wikimedia, especially on pages where the large number of edits make selective restoring of good edits impractical: A page is deleted, the vandalism edits are undeleted, the page is moved, the page is deleted, the original page with the good edits is undeleted. This is still a messy solution. --Splarka (talk) 01:19, 15 March 2007 (UTC)


 * I originally reasoned that splitting wasen't possible in the current MediaWiki because of that issue. If it were me working on the system I would have placed a sysop only checkbox on the movepage saying "Move Undeleted revisions only" and otherwise normal users wouldn't have the ability to split pages. But then again, I have another improvement for diff pages, the move page, and the deletion system. Maybe I'll work on them when I get around to it. 06:31, 15 March 2007 (UTC)