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:No. This is not how to merge the pages, merging needs to be done by an admin because the edit histories of the pages need to be preserved. | :No. This is not how to merge the pages, merging needs to be done by an admin because the edit histories of the pages need to be preserved. | ||
:Admin need to do the merging because it involves deleting pages and restoring page histories. --[[User:Tangerineduel|Tangerineduel]] / '''[[User talk:Tangerineduel|talk]]''' 06:38, 21 January 2024 (UTC) | :Admin need to do the merging because it involves deleting pages and restoring page histories. --[[User:Tangerineduel|Tangerineduel]] / '''[[User talk:Tangerineduel|talk]]''' 06:38, 21 January 2024 (UTC) | ||
::Yes. | |||
::The purpose of merging articles is the preserve the page's editing history, as that's how we check how things progressed, how pages are edited. If you look at this history page of [https://tardis.fandom.com/wiki/Cardiff_Central_station?action=history History:Cardiff Central station], which is one I recently merged, you can see when it was first created back in 2010, and all the intervening edits, then another very similar page was created in 2021. That's the magic of the wiki system, that we can track and see all of these edits. | |||
::But merging articles is a process of copying content from one page to another, deleting the page, moving the other page and then undeleting it and combining the page's histories. | |||
::If you just copy the info and turn the page into a redirect, then that original page's history stops with that redirect, and that edit history's contribution isn't present on the page the info has moved to and we lose easy and simple access to how a page was created, doubly so if that redirect gets deleted. | |||
::Also keep in mind that some pages tagged with a merger template are sometimes fairly straight forward, and may not need a discussion, while others such as [[Talk:The Many Lives of Doctor Who]] and its many associated pages is much more complicated. And some are just in the middle, with some clarification required, some people tag pages saying something like "page X and page Y are probably the same thing", but without material linking them that's often not good enough for a merger and follow up is required on the talk page. --[[User:Tangerineduel|Tangerineduel]] / '''[[User talk:Tangerineduel|talk]]''' 13:36, 21 January 2024 (UTC) | |||