User talk:Flatscan/RfC draft: Merge versus redirect

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WP:Administrators' noticeboard‎#Folken de Fanel (diff)

Discussion

Is redirecting without copying anything to the merge target a valid outcome to a WP:Merging discussion?
1. Is it a valid "merge"?
Does a merge closure at WP:Articles for deletion dictate some minimum amount to merge?

I have had success with providing numbered options in the RfC prompt (WT:Articles for deletion/Archive 58#Revisiting Merging during live AfD, WT:Articles for deletion/Archive 61#RfC: Merge, redirect). Flatscan (talk) 04:15, 17 October 2013 (UTC)[reply]

I'll just throw out opinion statements for the time being:-

I propose that for the purposes of this discussion a "merge" should be defined as something that triggers WP:CWW. I propose that this condition is both necessary and sufficient, so if it doesn't trigger CWW, then it is not a merge, and if it does it is.
I think that a WP:Merging discussion should be able decide not to merge any content, and redirect instead, if that makes editorial sense in context. The outcome of such a discussion is not a "merge".
I think that a "merge" close at AfD leads to a presumption that some kind of actual merge will take place. I can envisage rare situations in which a merge discussion might reach the conclusion that the merge isn't necessary, particularly if new information comes to light or a new source emerges. I think that if the decision is relatively extreme (exact definition to depend on the circumstances, but for example to keep the old page, or to keep more than 90% of the old page; or to redirect instead of merging, or to merge of less than, say, 10% of the content) then it would be good practice to contact the AfD participants and ask them for their input on the merge discussion before going ahead. The purpose of this is to make sure that a merge discussion can't be used to perform an end-run around AfD.
I think that if there's no consensus at the merge discussion about how much to remove, then the default is that the whole article being considered should be merged.—S Marshall T/C 23:38, 17 October 2013 (UTC)[reply]

WP:Copying within Wikipedia is a good start, but it has exceptions built into Where attribution is not needed. For example, I rewrote Internet vigilantism#YouTube cat abuse incident from sources (March 2009; see also WP:Articles for deletion/YouTube cat abuse incident, Talk:Internet vigilantism/Archive 1#YouTube cat abuse incident), and WP:Articles for deletion/World chicken population closed as merge and delete (August 2009).
I agree that no-copy redirects are okay. WP:Merging needs better guidance on edit summaries for no-copy redirects.
My concerns with AfD merges are described by WP:Merge what?: both participants and closers are too loose with merge recommendations and closures. When a merge may not be appropriate has an egregious example in WP:Articles for deletion/Ron Burgundy. In addition to generally insufficient consideration and discussion, the editors of the merge target are rarely notified before the AfD is closed and {{Afd-merge from}} is dropped on its talk page.
If there is no consensus, I would prefer no action, i.e. neither merge nor redirect. Jamming two articles together is an effective way to annoy the editors of both. Flatscan (talk) 04:41, 19 October 2013 (UTC)[reply]

I'm not understanding the point of this question. Despite a few editors who are intentionally misconstruing things, merge and redirect are separate, easily defined, well understood things: Content gets added to the target article in a merge, not in a redirect. What needs clarification? Jclemens (talk) 05:09, 18 October 2013 (UTC)[reply]

It seems plain and easily-understood to me too, but apparently not to everyone, so I'm quite happy to participate in an attempt to clarify it.—S Marshall T/C 08:10, 18 October 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Please don't speculate about editors' intentions or motivations. (This is a reply to Jclemens, but it is also intended for future participants.) Flatscan (talk) 04:41, 19 October 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Zooming in on the CWW issue first, because defining our terms is such a good starting point:- I agree that a merge discussion might decide not to merge any content but to rewrite instead, and I agree that this would not need attribution. I think that kind of decision is legitimate, but because of WP:PRESERVE, it should be unusual, an exception made to the normal practice on the basis of editorial judgment. Here is a suggested table of valid outcomes from a merge discussion:-

Merge discussion outcome	Definition	Triggers CWW?
Status quo	Decision not to merge	No
Full merge	Entire source article copy/pasted into target article	Yes
Partial merge	Parts of source article moved into target article, with some rewriting where appropriate. Also called smerge for "selective" or "slight" (Help:Merging#Selective paste merger, WP:SMERGE; WP:Guide to deletion#Shorthands).	Yes
Rewrite/merge	Some or all of the references from source article moved into target article, entire text rewritten from scratch (WP:Copying within Wikipedia#Where attribution is not needed)	Not necessarily
Redirect	No content from the source article moved into the target article	No

I still think only those outcomes that trigger WP:CWW are really "merges". The others are exceptional decisions made in unusual circumstances on the basis of editorial judgment, and I don't think they're what users have in mind when they !vote "merge" in an AfD.—S Marshall T/C 11:18, 19 October 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks for the table; it's a good, clear way to organize the outcomes. May I edit it directly? I have my eye on a few related AfDs of fictional elements. The articles are each longer than a stub, and the expected merge target for all of them is a list article, possibly within a single section. I think that full merges would be blatantly inappropriate based on length alone, but only one participant has specified how little should be merged. Flatscan (talk) 04:25, 25 October 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Please feel free!—S Marshall T/C 12:26, 25 October 2013 (UTC)[reply]

There is an ambiguity in the case of many articles being merged into one. Suppose a discussion ends with consensus to merge articles A, B, C, and D into list X, and also suppose that article C is nothing but duplication of content from article A, and that article D is gibberish from start to finish. In that case, articles A and B get merged, C and D merely get redirected, and the process considered as a whole is called a "merge". That should be obvious. The discussion that prompted this RfC was one of these situations, admittedly an extreme case where little content from the merged/redirected articles made it into the target, and I was not happy to see an editor being called a "liar" for using the word "merge" in the sense I've just described. Reyk _YO! 00:55, 21 October 2013 (UTC)[reply]

I agree with S Marshall's rather straightforward definition though I acknowledge that Reyk has a point that overlapping content in a many-to-one merge could get tricky. I don't agree that it was the case in the discussion that triggered this, but that's not the topic of this discussion. Hobit (talk) 02:09, 21 October 2013 (UTC)[reply]
I think there's a real and meaningful difference between a redirect and a merge, and I think that when editors !vote "merge" in an AfD they don't mean "redirect". I'm not here to discuss Folken de Fanel.—S Marshall T/C 19:35, 21 October 2013 (UTC)[reply]