Wikipedia talk:Merging

Based on what is currently happening at Talk:Placeholder name#Proposed merger of Oceanic Airlines into Placeholder name and its subsequent move to Talk:Fictional company#Proposed merger I think we need to have a serious discussion about procedural process for when a new target article is proposed for a merge. When it became clear that the original proposal to merge Oceanic Airlines to Placeholder name was clearly failing, the solution by FaviFake, the nominator, was to change the proposal to a new target article Fictional company which had cropped up as a suggested new place to merge. At that point the Placeholder name article was no longer pertinent to the merge discussion and yet the conversation was happening at Talk:Placeholder name. I argued that we should close it down for this reason and start a new WP:MERGEPROP be made so that a discussion could happen on a relevant talk page of one of the article's involved in the merge which procedurally I think is the least disruptive. Faviflake overruled this and then proceeded to copy paste the discussion (without discussion) at Talk:Fictional company#Proposed merger. This then ended up being discussed at Wikipedia:Administrators' noticeboard/Incidents#Clarity needed on moving talk page discussions during merge prop where an admin pointed out serious procedural problems with this move by interference with bots and their automated processes at MERGEPROP.

The problem I see with that is not only does it interfere with the bot processes in notifications/other technical stuff but it makes archiving very difficult by spreading a conversation across multiple talk pages. To me it's extremely disruptive at WP:MERGEPROP and I don't think we should allow talk page moves at all during a MERGEPROP. I would propose a simple solution to this which would be that we require the MERGEPROP discussions to occur on the page that is being merged into a target article and not on the target article page. That way if a new target article is proposed the conversation can continue without it being disruptive to the bot process or requiring a page move. Additionally I think we need to make it clear that if for some reason it is better to move to a new talk page that the discussion must be closed and a new MERGEPROP made at that page (ie a fresh start). This would bring better clarity to our process and prevent future issues of this kind. Thoughts?4meter4 (talk) 17:16, 11 August 2025 (UTC)

Hey there, it's always nice being mentioned in your posts. I'd like to give some context about the situation:

I argued that we should close it down for this reason [...]

Before you argued, you closed the discussion as an involved editor. It seems you did this because you misinterpreted my message, but I just thought it'd be relevant and should be mentioned.

This then ended up being discussed at [ANI] [...] where an admin pointed out serious procedural problems [...]

To be clear, the ANI thread was created by you and the only question the admin asked is "can we be certain that the bots and scripts will update the pages that point to the original location?"

As I explained at length here, I have fixed the bot issues and updated every page where the merger target for Oceanic Airlines was Placeholder name to "Fictional company". As you can see on this search, there are no more incorrect notifications about this merger. I explained to you that this should satify any concerns RedRose had about my edits.

They never mentioned "serious procedural problems"; they only said my actions were improper because I didn't update the notifications sent out by bots, and that issue is now fully resolved.

it makes archiving very difficult by spreading a conversation across multiple talk pages

I don't see how this kind of moves would cause archiving bots to break. The move notices are all correctly timestamped and they will be archived as usual. This practice is normal; for example at Wikipedia talk:Deletion process § "Wikipedia:DPROCESS" listed at RfD, a discussion was moved elsewhere with this diff by the OP because they thought it wasn't relevant in the OG talk page anymore.

And the conversation isn't "spread across pages", it's all in one place with at Talk:Fictional company § Proposed merger. Following the example above, I have removed the duplicate discussion over at Talk:Placeholder name § Proposed merger of Oceanic Airlines into Placeholder name, leaving a link to the correct section.

I only chose to move the discussion because the majority of editors in the discussion said they believed Fictional companies to be a better target for the merger, and because 4meter4 attempted to close it for this reason. Consensus was forming to merge the page into Fictional companies instead of the original target, so I moved it to allow it to continue and to satisfy the concerns of improper notification and labelling of the different pages.

Editors' time is a valuable resource that I didn't want to waste by disregarding the previous discussion and starting from scratch. I haven't been made aware of any policies advising against the practice and I don't think the change you're suggesting should be applied (for many reasons, which I'm sure are listed elsewhere); I'm mainly corcerned that it will result in less editors partecipating in merge discussions because of the lower visibility of the souce page copared to the destination page, and I don't think the risk of the target page changing is enough to warrant a policy change. Additionally, I think moving merge discussions should be encouraged or at least allowed, to avoid wasting people's time and get clearer consensus. FaviFake (talk) 18:00, 11 August 2025 (UTC)

You've mischaracterized what was said at ANI. Redrose64 stated I would say that FaviFake has performed a series of improper actions. Your actions were improper which is why an RFC is necessary.4meter4 (talk) 02:35, 14 August 2025 (UTC)

You have too. An admin didn't "[point] out serious procedural problems."

I agree an RfC is needed if you want to change the policy. But I suspect our two walls of text and this backstory would not get much interest. You could ask, "Should this sentence in [policy name] be added/changed? "Merge and split discussions should only be held at the source page, not the destination of the merge or split."

Your original argument was "[...] other editor's comments get copy pasted to a different talk page without their consent. I'm not ok with this", while now it has shifted to "it interfere[s] with the bot processes in notifications/other technical stuff [and] it makes archiving very difficult". As I explained, I don't personally believe these to be good enough reasons for such a drastic change, since the first one is a standard process and the second one is easily fixable. But feel free to go ahead if you believe otherwise. FaviFake (talk) 10:37, 14 August 2025 (UTC)

I haven’t done anything procedural in this case, so there is no “you have too”. Further improper actions means improper procedural behavior in this context. Please refrain from wall of text responses that are frankly inaccurate representations of reality. This is becoming WP:DISRUPTIVE.4meter4 (talk) 14:10, 14 August 2025 (UTC)

You seem to have misread my message; I said "You have too", not that "you have to" do it. FaviFake (talk) 14:14, 14 August 2025 (UTC)

It was a typo. I didn’t misread it.4meter4 (talk) 14:22, 14 August 2025 (UTC)

Oh, then my reply wasn't clear. I meant you've mischaracterized what was said at ANI too. FaviFake (talk) 14:25, 14 August 2025 (UTC)

No I haven’t. You don’t understand what was said at ANI, and continue to not understand.4meter4 (talk) 14:39, 14 August 2025 (UTC)

This conversation has been very productive so far; I suggest we continue bickering until the issue resolves itself. FaviFake (talk) 14:44, 14 August 2025 (UTC)

The whole point of this conversation was to follow RFC pre-procedure as required to do before instigating an RFC. That requires outside community engagement and a period of public comment.4meter4 (talk) 15:11, 14 August 2025 (UTC)

Yes, I know. To attract more editors, you could consider notifying Wikipedia:WikiProject Merge and Wikipedia:Help Project. FaviFake (talk) 16:02, 14 August 2025 (UTC)

Earlier this year, an editor created the Godzilla (Showa); it basically serves as an all-encompassing character article for the 15 iterations of Godzilla from the franchise's Showa period (1954—1975). But a week ago, the same editor created a separate character article for the first incarnation from 1954 . I brought up on the talk page that a separate article for the '54 variant doesn't make sense when it can be covered in the Godzilla (Showa) article . The OP realized their mistake and seemingly agreed to my proposal to merge the articles . I tried to merge it myself but I'm not sure if I did it right? Please help.

Also, forgive me if I crossed some lines in my attempts to merge. This was my first time doing anything like this. I tried to follow WP:PROMERGE as best I could. Armegon (talk) 05:33, 16 August 2025 (UTC)

Thanks for both proposing the merge and acting on it! You've got the talk page templates and the redirect right; the one main thing I can't see are clear edit summaries on Godzilla (Showa) to indicate which of the many edit you performed on the 16th August relate to merge and which don't. It's better to do a 'full content merge', merging with one edit as much of the content as you intend to move, marking in the edit summary Merged content from [[source page]] to here. See [[Talk:merge discussion section]]. You can then tidy it up with further edits. So, you might want to read point 1 in WP:PROMERGE again. It's also helpful, even if you don't formally closed the discussion (not really necessary for very short discussions), to add at the end of the discussion something like template:merge done, which marks to readers of the talk page that this has been completed (rather than them starting to think about the discussion - they might not think to look at the template at the top of the page). There also seems to have been some confusion on the talk page regarding a move and a merge, but a solution seems to have been found; I haven't reviewed the completeness of the merge of the referenced content (tricky to to with that edit history). Klbrain (talk) 11:25, 16 August 2025 (UTC)

Thank you so much! Armegon (talk) 16:33, 16 August 2025 (UTC)

The main character of the film Wrinkles the Clown is Wrinkles the Clown. The character article has been cleaned up a lot, but seems to have been created based on the misconception that Wrinkles is "an unknown man living in Naples, Florida who, for a fee of 'a few hundred dollars', will attend birthdays, scare misbehaving kids". I just copied some of the background info from the character article to add the section Wrinkles_the_Clown_(film)#Production. It probably does not make sense to have an article on the clown if the sources are all covering the same ground as sources about the documentary. Ronald McDonald and Bozo the Clown appear across a range of media and events, but Wrinkles is just in this project. What would the next steps be to merge the articles? If there is a single article, then it shouldn't be at Wrinkles the Clown (film), but to copy and paste the film article to the correct target would obscure much of the editing history. What's the best practice for a case like this? Rjjⁱⁱⁱ (talk) 19:35, 30 August 2025 (UTC)

Firstly, by adding the merge templates to point interested readers to the discussion (I've done this now). To telegraph the complexity to editors, I've used the merge template (rather than 'merge to' and 'merge from'), but also added a 'target' parameter so that the intention is clear. I've pointed it to the discussion you've already started. Regarding the mechanisms, treating this simply as a merge from Wrinkles the Clown (film) to Wrinkles the Clown is fine, merging such that text covers both the film and the character. The editing histories are transparently available to any editors if the relevant merged from and merged to templates are placed on the talk pages. Klbrain (talk) 17:10, 31 August 2025 (UTC)

Thanks! That all makes sense. Rjjⁱⁱⁱ (talk) 17:16, 31 August 2025 (UTC)

Pinging Redrose64 as reverter and @Femke and @CoroneC0rnix-64 as other revertees.

This is the full list of changes that were reverted, dating back to August 4th. Among them are edits made by me and the two editors. I don't really understand Redrose's revert. These edits were mostly fixing redirects, links, formatting changes, and streamlining section names. I do not see how I'm, as Redrose's edit summary says, "messing around with these pages". FaviFake (talk) 19:51, 22 September 2025 (UTC)

Hi, @FaviFake! I, too, am confused by @Redrose64's reversion and seemingly frustrated tone. My edit was simply to remove a dead link to a file, keeping the original text. I see no point in insisting that a link be there if it just points to a non-existent page. Also, @FaviFake, your edits seemed fine to me as well. They may be slightly wrong or violate an MoS rule (I don't know if they do; I'm just speculating reason for reversion), but that certainly doesn't constitute "messing around with these pages." @Redrose64, please explain. Thanks, CoroneC0rnix-64 (talk | my edits) 20:26, 22 September 2025 (UTC)

Please see Wikipedia:Village pump (proposals) § RfC: Merging merge discussions with AfD. voorts (talk/contributions) 18:27, 19 January 2026 (UTC)

@FaviFake, I saw you reverted my note on copying content. Its mostly an issue I've run into a few times with named references where the text when copied from the article or from the visual editor of the source article gets the named reference tag but not the reference itself and then produced errors in the references section saying that there's no known reference with that name. See also this discussion on my talk page from another editor who asked for some help. I checked their edit history and they had done the edits with the visual editor and when I pasted the wikicode from the source into the visual editor it remediated the issue.

I've reworded my note a little and re-added it because I think it provides a good trouble shooting step if editors run into the issue before they need help or give up on performing the merge. Let me know what you think? ScrubbedFalcon (talk) 10:28, 1 March 2026 (UTC)

Thanks for your message! I just don't understand what difference it makes if one copies a named reference using the ve instead of the source editor. Won't the source editor also copy the same call without the reference itself? FaviFake (talk) 13:39, 1 March 2026 (UTC)

I'm not sure exactly what causes it, I know its happened to me before and this is how I solved it. I'm trying to recreate the error from the most recent example in my sandbox. I know that this is the error diff in namespace. I copied the wikitext from that diff to this sandbox page. The errors appear differently in the sandbox it seems, in the article namespace version they appear in the reference list as: "Cite error: The named reference XYZ was invoked but never defined (see the help page)." in the sandbox version they are simply blank references. Meanwhile on a separate sandbox article I've pasted the wikitext from the source article where the references are defined. I'll keep messing with it tomorrow, but feel free to take a look and see if you can pinpoint the source of the error if you want? ScrubbedFalcon (talk) 18:47, 1 March 2026 (UTC)