Help:Splitting and merging

This page is intended to inform briefly about how to split and merge articles.

Licencing requirements
Contributors to the SDIY wiki are not asked to surrender their copyright to the material they contribute. Instead, they are required to co-license their contributions under the copyleft license Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License (CC-BY-SA). This licenses allow reuse and modification, but reserves the right to attribution.

Splitting articles
Splitting is a manual process by which the contents of a page are split into two or more pages. There are two main reasons for splitting content: size and content relevance. For uncontroversial splits, no permission is needed to split; just do it. If unsure, start a discussion on the talkpage.

In the talk page of the source article insert the split from template, ie..

In the talk page of the destination article insert the split from template, ie..

This is to indicate where the CC-BY-SA attribution to the contributors can be found. Notes also need to be put in edit summaries of both articles, eg. Split to destination article name and Split from source article name.

Copying articles from other wikis
Where the licencing permits copying, such as from Wikipedia, use the Split from template on the destination articles talk-page. For example, using an external link to the source page:

Merging articles
A merging of articles is a manual process, cut and pasting text from one article into another.

Reasons to merge a page include: unnecessary duplication of content, significant overlap with the topic of another page, and minimal content that could be covered in an article on a broader topic. If you are uncertain of the merger's appropriateness, or believe it might be controversial, or your merger ends up reverted, you can propose it on either or both of the affected aricles talk pages.

After cut and pasting the content, save the destination page with an edit summary eg. Merge content from Source article. Save the source page with an edit summary eg. Merge content to Destination article. This is done to comply with CC-BY-SA licensing.

If the entire source article is merged, replace it with a redirect ie. #REDIRECT Destination article

Where there is content in the source article talk page, place a link to the source article's talk-page at the top of the destination article's talk-page, such as: Article merged: See old talk-page at Source article.

In the talk page of the source article insert the merge to template, ie..

In the talk page of the destination article insert the merge from template, ie..

Article history
If the two pages have separate parallel histories before they were merged, they should not be history-merged, as that would shuffle the parallel editing histories together into one and make a mess.