Craig Schiller wrote:
Actually, GFDL quite specifically *requires* that if an article is merged into another one, the old title has to be kept as a redirect in order to preserve the edit history.
This is what's meant by "merge and delete is not a possible vote". We can all *imagine* situations where it's the preference we would *want* to express, but that's a moot point: it's quite explicitly not a *permissible* vote under the terms of GFDL.
Ah, I hadn't considered that. How could a merge ever result in a delete, then? To comply with the GFDL we'd have to do one of those delete-move-restore tricks that would shuffle the two edit histories together, and if the two articles had never been together before that would probably result in a bit of a mess.