Wikipedia:Cleaning up after a move

After moving a page, you should be prepared to perform a number of resulting clean-up tasks. Two of the most commonly required actions are updating the article's prose to reflect the new title and updating navigational templates to wikilink directly to the new title.

Whether any one of the below clean-up tasks is required will depend on the circumstances of the move. Some of the most involved clean-up tasks are limited to moves which introduce a change in "topic structure", for example when an article is moved to a title which previously referred to a disambiguation page.

Update the prose of the article

In most cases, the running text of an article will refer to the article subject by the title term, and will begin with a bolded instance of the title.

For example, if the article Chocolate bar were moved to the title Candy bar, the opening paragraph:

A chocolate bar (Commonwealth English) or candy bar (some dialects of American English) is a confection containing chocolate, which may also contain layerings or mixtures that include nuts, fruit, caramel, nougat, and wafers. A wide variety of chocolate bar brands are sold.

should be updated to place the new title first, and replace generic instances of "chocolate bar" with "candy bar":

A candy bar (some dialects of American English) or chocolate bar (Commonwealth English) is a confection containing chocolate, which may also contain layerings or mixtures that include nuts, fruit, caramel, nougat, and wafers. A wide variety of candy bar brands are sold.

A "search and replace" tool may be helpful here, though it should not be applied blindly. For example, "chocolate bar" should not be replaced if it occurs in a direct quote, a name, the title of a reference, etc.

Update sidebars and navbars

Pages that have a sidebar or navbar template will need their page title in the template edited from the old name to the new name. Until this is altered, the old page title, which usually becomes a redirect to the new title, will appear as a blue wikilink instead of as the unlinked page name in boldface type (see WP:NAVNOREDIRECT).

Update default sort keys

In certain cases, a default sort key may need to be updated, removed, or inserted. For example:

• If the article Cat Stevens were moved to Yusuf Islam, then the existing {{DEFAULTSORT:Stevens, Cat}} would need to be replaced with {{DEFAULTSORT:Islam, Yusuf}}
• If the article Isle of Mull were moved to the title Mull (island), then the following defaultsort could be deleted as unnecessary: {{DEFAULTSORT:Mull, Isle of}}
• If the article Lady Gaga were moved to Stefani Germanotta, the following default sort key would need to be added: {{DEFAULTSORT:Germanotta, Stefani}}

Fix archiving

If the talk page is automatically archived, it will have archiving bot settings (such as with {{User:MiszaBot/config}} or {{User:ClueBot III/ArchiveThis}}) which have hardcoded page names. After closing the move and moving the talk page and its archived subpages, the bot settings need to be updated or the archiving bot will stop archiving the moved talk page. In some circumstances, this will involve updating (moving) a hard-coded bot subpage. Example. All archives should be moved to correspond with the new page name, including any that have been manually created.

Move related pages for consistency

Pages which are subsidiary to the moved page should have titles consistent with it. For example, if Cat Stevens were moved to Yusuf Islam, the following would likely also need to be moved accordingly:

• The eponymous category Category:Cat Stevens and subcategories like Category:Cat Stevens songs. These can be requested as a speedy move at WP:CFD using the criterion WP:C2D
• Mainspace articles on subtopics such as Cat Stevens discography and Trouble (Cat Stevens song)
• The eponymous template Template:Cat Stevens

Editnotices

Occasionally, a page has an accompanying editnotice in the template namespace. For example, the editnotice for 0.999... is Template:Editnotices/Page/0.999.... Sometimes, a page may be accompanied by a group editnotice (like this one), or more rarely, a protection editnotice (like this one). If a page with an editnotice is moved, the editnotices should move with them. Currently, this requires the technical assistance of an administrator, template editor or page mover. If the editnotice move was done by a non-page-mover a redirect may be left over. This should typically be deleted as G6, unless the editnotice also applies to the redirect itself.

Cleaning up after a change in topic structure

A change in topic structure occurs when some title A previously referred to topic X, and after the move refers to topic Y (where X or Y may be the subject of a mainspace article or a disambiguation page).

This most commonly occurs when an article is promoted to be the primary topic for a name (e.g. if Mercury (planet) were moved to Mercury) or vice versa (e.g. if Venus were moved to Venus (planet), with the disambiguation page moving to the basename). In rare cases, one topic may have its name usurped by a different topic. An example is at Talk:Shinola Detroit#Requested move 13 May 2018. In that case, an article about a modern retail company was moved from the base name Shinola to Shinola (retail company), with the base name becoming the new home for an article about a historical brand of shoe polish.

Fix mistargeted wikilinks

Suppose the article Venus were moved to the title Venus (planet), with the base name holding a disambiguation page. As a result, there will now be many [[Venus]] wikilinks across the project which used to link to an article about a planet but now link to a disambiguation page. All these links should be replaced with [[Venus (planet)|Venus]] (though you should not replace links in the User namespace or any of the Talk namespaces).

It is especially important to fix mistargeted wikilinks for fair use rationales in the File namespace so that the image is not marked for deletion as orphaned.

If there are many wikilinks that need to be replaced, consider using a semi-automated tool like AutoWikiBrowser, or filing a request at Wikipedia:AutoWikiBrowser/Tasks.

Update disambiguation pages

A topic should be linked at the top of a disambiguation page if and only if it is the primary topic. If your moves have the effect of demoting a page from or promoting it to primary topic, the corresponding disambiguation page should be updated accordingly.

Add or remove hatnotes

A change to topic structure may necessitate adding or removing hatnotes to allow users to navigate between topics that share a name. For example, if Mercury (planet) were moved to the base name "Mercury", an {{otheruses}} hatnote would need to be added so that readers could navigate from that page to Mercury (disambiguation). Conversely, if an article is moved away from an ambiguous title (e.g. Venus -> "Venus (planet)"), it may render existing hatnotes on the page redundant.