Biocrawler:How to fix cut and paste moves
From Biocrawler, the free encyclopedia.
- To request a merger of duplicate articles, see Biocrawler:Duplicate articles.
Many past renamings took place before the move page function was created by our hard-working developers.
Other cut and paste moves are done by people not aware of this function.
Such manual moves were done using cut and paste. As a result, the page history of an article or talk page can be split among two or more different pages.
In some circumstances, administrators are able to fix this by merging page histories - see Biocrawler:Cut and paste move repair holding pen.
Warning: this procedure may only be undone by spending quite silly amounts of time: to undo a merge, every single version has to be manually reassigned to its respective former page. Do not do this if you're not sure what you're doing.
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An easy case
The following procedure merges the page histories in the case of a hypothetical example:
Suppose Alabama/History (old title) was the only article on that subject, and that the article developed in the course of a number of edits, until a decision that History of Alabama (new title) was a better style of name for the article. Suppose further that for whatever reason, the contents of the old article were
- cut from the old article,
- replaced in it with a redirect to the new title, and
- pasted into a newly created article bearing the new title.
(That is, the move tool was not available or not used, to simultaneously transfer the Wiki text and the history of edits to the new title.) And suppose this replacement (new-title) article develops further and reflects the new history of these further edits. Our goal is to graft the (old) edit history from Alabama/History (article with old title) onto the new history in History of Alabama (article with new title) where those partial histories can complement each other. The admin:
- Deletes History of Alabama, with comment deleting to merge page histories - back soon. (Now the new title has no versions in its history.)
- Moves Alabama/History to History of Alabama, using the move tool. (Now the old versions are the whole of the new title's history.)
- Undeletes the History of Alabama article, by
- Viewing the Page history, *
- Linking via "View or restore ... deleted edits?", and
- Clicking on "Restore!". (Now the new title's history has both the old and new versions, including the redirect created by the move tool.)
- Reverts to the last version before the move, by
- Linking via "Page history" on History of Alabama.
- Pressing Ctrl + F5 (on Internet Explorer -- whatever action forces a hard refresh with the browser in use), in order to see an up-to-date history reflecting the undeletion.
- Selecting, editing, and saving the pre-move version.
Note
Note 1: As of 2004 with MediaWiki 1.3.0beta5, either or both of two peculiarities may be observed:
- The success of the undeletion may be announced, but its results not be observable for a number of hours.
- The merged history may have all the versions of the two formerly separate articles, but without the most recent being shown at the top of the history list, and without the most recently edited version being delivered by the server, until a further edit is made to the article.
Note 2: Lately (as of early March 2005), with MediaWiki 1.4rc1 (http://wikipedia.sourceforge.net/), it sometimes happens that viewing the history in step 3.1 shows the history of the just deleted page, not the history of the page just moved. If that happens, selecting either a different history length (e.g. "last 100" instead of the default 50) or making a gratuitous edit on the page just moved will force the correct history to be shown. It seems to be a caching problem, not some problem with page moves or the database.
A troublesome case
However, the example just described has the feature that one history ends before the other begins; the corresponding procedure is inadequate if this condition does not apply, i.e, if the page with the old title has been edited after the pasting of its contents into the new article. For example, it is not uncommon for
- an article at (old) page A to be cut and pasted into (new) page B, and
- page A to later be edited to become a disambiguation page.
In this case, the time periods of the two series of edits will overlap.
The procedure above performs a page-history merge that (sooner or later) sequences the versions strictly by time, with the result that various versions of A, when it had the role of disambiguation page, will be interleaved between versions in the page history of page B (and/or vice-versa). Inspecting this merged history without means of distinguishing between the two overlapping progressions invites severe confusion.
An appropriate procedure for such a case is to forego the procedure above and instead put a note as to the original source of the page, and author credits, on the talk page.
