Wikipedia talk:Merge and delete

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I think perhaps we need a policy page at Wikipedia:Merge and delete.

At the very least we need a discussion page such as this one. Despite various attempts to clarify the relevant policy pages and most notably Wikipedia:Deletion policy#Commenting on a listing for deletion we seem to have regular attempts to merge and delete an article with no regard for the history. See Wikipedia:Votes for deletion/A Heinlein Trio (2nd vote) for an example.

The situation is that, under the GFDL, we need to preserve information on the authorship of the text in Wikipedia. Under the GFDL authors retain their copyright unless they have somehow relinquished it, and so Wikipedia is in breach of their copyright if we retain the text but delete the authorship information. Some GFDL proponents in fact see it as important that authors do retain their copyrights, in order to preserve the viral nature of the licence. That is, if you put your text into the Public Domain for example, then someone is free to use it in another place and they don't need to make this work available to Wikipedia. But, if you just license your work under the GFDL, then anyone else who uses it (subject to some exclusions) must license their work under the GFDL too, so it's also available to Wikipedia (and others).

There are two separate issues often confused.

• One is what the Wikipedia policies and procedures are. On the matter of merge and delete, they are that the history must be preserved in some way whenever the text is preserved. I don't think there's a lot of doubt there, although there seems some confusion in the minds of many people.
• A separate issue is what they should be. Here is a good place to discuss this issue.

The easiest and most nearly foolproof way of preserving history is as history. This means making the page into a useful redirect, renaming it if necessary. Note that the result of a rename is to move the history to the new name. The resulting redirect from the original name has no significant history, and assuming this name is agreed to be useless, can be deleted without too much trouble.

Enough for now. Who wants to discuss this here? Or, it's often been discussed elsewhere. Anyone want to provide links to existing discussions etc that you think are helpful to clarify any of the above? Andrewa 23:57, 27 Feb 2005 (UTC)

So the project page will presumably say some of what you have above, such as

• Merge and delete may cause problems over the history and so the GFDL.
• Merge and redirect may be a better option. It still leaves open the future option to delete the redirect if appropriate.

Fine by me --Henrygb 00:50, 28 Feb 2005 (UTC)

This has been discussed repeatedly before - usually on Wikipedia talk:Votes for deletion. The topic comes up again usually within a few weeks of the page being archived. Oddly, the last time is still on the talk page. See Wikipedia talk:Votes for deletion#Merge and delete. I'm not sure that a separate policy page will be any easier to find or remember than the current discussions but I'm willing to give it a try... Rossami (talk) 04:29, 28 Feb 2005 (UTC)

Do you mean the discussion archived at Wikipedia talk:Votes for deletion/August 2004#"Merge and delete", or has there been a more recent one? Andrewa 20:12, 28 Feb 2005 (UTC)

I'll answer that myself... See Wikipedia talk:Votes for deletion#Merge and Delete (note capitalisation). Andrewa 20:17, 28 Feb 2005 (UTC)

The most recent discussion that I know of has now been archived to Wikipedia talk:Votes for deletion/January-February 2005#Merge and Delete. As promised, the topic resurfaced almost immediately after being archived. Rossami (talk) 00:17, 10 Mar 2005 (UTC)

You have not had any negative comments, so write the project page (which can then be pointed to on VfD) in a tone of explanation rather than prescription. If you don't, I will, though you will be free to change it. --Henrygb 19:05, 11 Mar 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Old talk page discussion above

Why is the old talk page discussion above older than the essay? Looks like an earlier essay at this title was deleted. Carcharoth 02:47, 15 November 2007 (UTC)

Ok. This explains it. Sort of. Carcharoth 02:48, 15 November 2007 (UTC)

Someone proposed this as policy but never wrote it (that was before we had essays). Then that conversation got moved around some. I moved it back here since that's where it used to be. It's ancient history, however, so perhaps it would be better off in an archive. Chick Bowen 02:52, 15 November 2007 (UTC)

[edit] History merging

Should this _really_ be advocating merging the history of two articles that have existed at the same time? While the presence of the names in the history section is adequate to satisfy the GFDL, the issue of it resulting in diffs that misrepresent users' actions is a potential problem. —Random832 17:05, 16 November 2007 (UTC)

It depends on circumstances. For lightly-edited articles it's not likely to be a problem. For heavily-edited articles options 2 or 3 would be preferred (or leaving the redirect). -- Chick Bowen (talk) 17:29, 16 November 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Possible, yes. Routinely good idea, no.

Sure those three approaches have all been suggested, but none of them are especially good from an AfD perspective and nor (IANAL) from a compliance perspective. Fixing cut-n-paste moves by munging their histories is one thing. Misrepresenting what editors did at the boundaries between articles is something else entirely, and is probably almost never done as the result of an AfD. (I've done it occasionally when repairing an exceptionally bad cut-n-paster, but in fact though the actions were misrepresented very slightly, the user's intent was not). This thing of pasting history credit to the talk page is also exceptionally rare, and also highly sub-optimal as most talk pages get archived eventually at which point any meaningful link between the work and its authorship is broken. Whether it exists in the first place is questionable since there'd be nothing in the article or its history to indicate the existence of an auxilliary history. The same problem stands for the (rather arcane, imo) moving of the merged article to 'subtalk'-space. In short I think it not unreasonable to continue to deprecate this as an option in AfD, and to seek to clearly dissuade editors from suggesting it, both during the debate and during the close. I gather from the final sentence that someone has recently been having a run-in about it?

I would much prefer that people simply understand that when recommending an article be merged they are implicitly requesting that a redirect (cheap, harmless) is going to be retained. That approach has worked well for a very long time. (If the redirect would not be harmless, then neither was the content, and it oughtn't be merged anywhere).

'Delete and make redirect' is unrelated to 'delete and merge' since the history is being deliberately dispensed with. The creation of the redirect is an editorial action not dependent on the previous article's authorship in any way. Splash - tk 00:25, 17 November 2007 (UTC)

I don't disagree with any of this necessarily, and if the essay does not make clear that this is rare it should. My point is twofold: first of all, that the GFDL does not, as is frequently claimed, prevent merge and delete, but that people should know how to do it properly (I know of a number of instances in which the history of an article has been broken through a bungled merge and delete), and secondly, that there is no point in debating it in AfDs, which happens all the time; the only question is whether there's some special reason to delete the redirect. Chick Bowen (talk) 02:23, 17 November 2007 (UTC)

I hope that I've clarified things a bit. The "delete and make redirect" bit was added by Carcharoth, but I think I clarified that too. Chick Bowen (talk) 02:32, 17 November 2007 (UTC)

That was an improvement, but I still do not think that it should leave the impression that 'merge and delete' is really an accepted AfD suggestion when it really is not. All three methods are rare in the extreme. The latter two almost never occur and are very questionable from a GFDL compliance perspective (imo), and if the first is being done, then this is more usually completed with redirection. If someone bungles a history merge (regrettably not so uncommon) then it can be fixed by a determined-enough admin. I made some further edits in this light. Splash - tk 02:55, 18 November 2007 (UTC)

It reads a lot clearer now; thanks. Chick Bowen 03:49, 18 November 2007 (UTC)