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Wikipedia:Merging

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A merger is a non-automated procedure by which the contents of two or more pages are united within a single page. Merging creates a redirect from the source page(s) to the destination page, with some or all of the content copied and pasted into that page. Editors should use their discretion to decide whether or not a discussion should occur before spending the time to merge articles.

Do not use the discussion procedure described below to propose:

There are several good reasons to merge pages:

Merging should be avoided if:

Merging—regardless of the amount of information kept—should always leave a redirect (or, in some cases, a disambiguation page) in place. This is often needed to allow proper attribution through the edit history for the source page. Superfluous redirects do not harm anything, and they can be helpful in finding articles, e.g. from alternative names.

You may find that some or all of the information to be merged is already in the destination page. That is fine; you can feel free to delete the redundant information and only add new material. If there is no information to be added to the destination page, you can simply redirect the other page there, but please make this clear in the edit summary.

Users may determine whether pages should be merged. If the need for a merge is obvious, individual editors can be bold and simply do it. This might be appropriate and easy where, for example, there are two stubs with nearly the same title with slightly different spellings. Bold edits might be reverted, so if a merge is going to take a lot of work to implement, that is something to consider if there is any room for doubt. Articles that have been separate for a long time, especially on controversial topics, may have editor support for remaining separate; these are the best candidates for discussing before merging.

In most circumstances, a local discussion conducted on an article talk page should attract sufficient input. This should include the proposal itself, the list of the affected pages, and a merger rationale. To start a discussion, perform the following steps.

This is usually done on the proposed destination page's talk page, but exceptions exist:

Example: if suggesting that Foo be merged into Bar, create a proposal to merge Foo into Bar in a new section at . Start a new section at the bottom of that talk page and include the proposal itself, the list of the affected pages, and a merger rationale. A good example is the following section:


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