Sam Korn wrote:
On 11/19/05, Bryan Derksen
<bryan.derksen(a)shaw.ca> wrote:
AfD has nothing to do with merging, though, except
that it's often
recommended as part of a keep vote for something to do with the article
after its AfD listing is finished. Anyone can merge an article any time
without going to AfD to get "permission" about it. I've merged plenty of
articles myself that way.
The logical conclusion of this is that merge votes are actually votes
to keep. That is not true.
Isn't it? If an article gets one third "keep" votes, one third
"merge"
votes, and one third "delete" votes, the article gets kept. Even if an
article gets 100% merge votes, it's still "kept" - the old title gets
turned into a redirect and the information that was there gets moved
into an existing article the redirect points to. And this isn't a
binding forever and ever result like "delete" is, either, so the
material could eventually get split back out and moved to the old title
again one day if it grows enough to warrant it. I myself can think of
two cases where I merged articles after an AfD, complaints arose from
people who didn't like the resulting merged article, so I split the
material back out again to the original location and that was that.
I see "merge" as a vote to keep accompanied by a recommendation for how
to clean up the kept article afterward.