Tony Sidaway wrote:
On 10/8/05, Alphax alphasigmax@gmail.com wrote:
So history merges are useful only for cut-and-paste moves?
Yes, pretty much. The problem with history merges is that the software provides no means of unmerging elements from the history. One they're there, there's no way to get them out again.
There are other circumstances that call for a history merge, but the general principle here is important. Whether it's a cut-and-paste move, or duplicate articles created independently (I've done several recently where this happened due to variant spellings), a history merge should generally be done only if the articles are about the exact same topic, and will never need to be taken apart again.
Furthermore, with articles nominated for deletion, we're generally talking about a short article being merged into a larger one about a broader topic. As was pointed out, merging history produces disjointed and mostly useless diffs. Also, merging by cut-and-paste is not necessarily desirable anyway, and if you rewrite the basic material you're merging from, then you're using the merged article as a resource rather than creating a derivative work, so concerns about GFDL compliance can be eliminated.
--Michael Snow
On 10/8/05, Michael Snow wikipedia@earthlink.net wrote:
Tony Sidaway wrote:
On 10/8/05, Alphax alphasigmax@gmail.com wrote:
So history merges are useful only for cut-and-paste moves?
Yes, pretty much. The problem with history merges is that the software provides no means of unmerging elements from the history. One they're there, there's no way to get them out again.
There are other circumstances that call for a history merge, but the general principle here is important. Whether it's a cut-and-paste move, or duplicate articles created independently (I've done several recently where this happened due to variant spellings), a history merge should generally be done only if the articles are about the exact same topic, and will never need to be taken apart again.
Furthermore, with articles nominated for deletion, we're generally talking about a short article being merged into a larger one about a broader topic. As was pointed out, merging history produces disjointed and mostly useless diffs. Also, merging by cut-and-paste is not necessarily desirable anyway, and if you rewrite the basic material you're merging from, then you're using the merged article as a resource rather than creating a derivative work, so concerns about GFDL compliance can be eliminated.
--Michael Snow _______________________________________________ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@Wikipedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Well-said Michael. You covered everything I didn't know how to say. I'll save this message for further reference.