Wikipedia:How to fix cut and paste moves

Cut-and-paste moves still occur today because of unfamiliarity with the move function, unawareness that attribution is necessary, or when the move function fails (e.g., because the target has history) and people don't know to use the requested moves forum to ask for help from an administrator.

When a cut-and-paste move is done, the page history of an article or talk page can be split among two or more different pages. This is highly undesirable, because we need to keep the history with the content for copyright reasons. (See ).

In some circumstances, administrators can fix this by merging page histories, using the procedure given below.

In cases where additional edits were made to the original version after the copy-and-paste and which the additional edits can all be safely discarded (e.g. WP:WPAFC-related templates, edits which were reverted, etc.), place {{Histmerge|NAME OF PAGE THE ARTICLE WAS CUT FROM|reason=|details=}} at the new location as described above. Fill in the two parameters as needed for this particular situation (see {{}} for an example).

If there are no changes since the copied-from revision in either the original page or the pasted-to page, consider tagging the pasted page for temporary deletion using {{}} (see WP:Speedy deletion#G6), and then do a proper page move. or a similar tool should be used to verify that no changes have been made.

In more complex cases (explained below), please leave a description of the problem at .

Administrators can use a special page, , to perform history merges. It differs from the manual methods, as follows:

Warning: this procedure may only be undone by spending quite silly amounts of time. To undo a merge, see below. Do not do this if you're not sure what you're doing.

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

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