Tony Sidaway wrote:
On 10/8/05, Alphax <alphasigmax(a)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