[WikiEN-l] Merging policy

[phoebe ayers]

On 1/14/07, theProject <wp.theproject at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Our merging policy currently states that text-dump mergers are considered
> as
> acceptable progress, although this was met with criticism last time it was
> brought up on the mailing list. Is such procedure still acceptable? My
> thoughts are that if text dump mergers are acceptable, then perhaps
> significant headway could be made into the merge backlog with a semi-bot
> of
> some sort. Please comment.


If you read all of the paragaph that you quote, it says:

"Simply dumping the text from one page onto another *is* progress, because
it puts all of the information on the same topic on the same page. This,
however, seldom results in a smooth-flowing article. Fixing that may require
a great deal of time and rewriting. If you can do that, terrific! Future
readers will greatly benefit from your contribution. If you do not have the
time or expertise to do so, please tag the article for attention; select a
template from Wikipedia:Cleanup
resources<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Cleanup_resources>,
such as {{cleanup <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:Cleanup>}} or {{
cleanup <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:Cleanup>|January 2007}}
(using the current month and year as the parameter)."

In other words, you're only halfway there if you do a text dump merger: you
end up with one article, but it's worse than it was before, and it will need
further cleanup. Considering that the {{cleanup}} backlog is even worse than
the merge backlog, producing lots of merged pages that need to be cleaned up
seems like it would be going nowhere fast. True, it's work to do mergers by
hand (and we could certainly improve the instructions on how to do them) but
you do get everything done in one go, and often end up with a much better
article in the end (since obvious merge candidates are often not the best
quality to begin with).

So, I'd be inclined to take that entire paragraph out. I also wish that I
could invent a cluestick that would keep people from just redirecting pages
without making an attempt to merge in useful content, but sadly that's
probably not possible.

-- phoebe (brassratgirl)