[WikiEN-l] Re: Merge vs. Keep/Delete

Sat Oct 8 16:31:30 UTC 2005

Tony Sidaway wrote:

>On 10/8/05, Alphax <alphasigmax at gmail.com> wrote:
>  
>
>>So history merges are useful only for cut-and-paste moves?
>>    
>>
>Yes, pretty much. The problem with history merges is that the software
>provides no means of unmerging elements from the history. One they're there,
>there's no way to get them out again.
>  
>
There are other circumstances that call for a history merge, but the 
general principle here is important. Whether it's a cut-and-paste move, 
or duplicate articles created independently (I've done several recently 
where this happened due to variant spellings), a history merge should 
generally be done only if the articles are about the exact same topic, 
and will never need to be taken apart again.

Furthermore, with articles nominated for deletion, we're generally 
talking about a short article being merged into a larger one about a 
broader topic. As was pointed out, merging history produces disjointed 
and mostly useless diffs. Also, merging by cut-and-paste is not 
necessarily desirable anyway, and if you rewrite the basic material 
you're merging from, then you're using the merged article as a resource 
rather than creating a derivative work, so concerns about GFDL 
compliance can be eliminated.

--Michael Snow