Help:Splitting and merging

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

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 GFDL 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.

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 cutting the content, save the destination page with an edit summary eg. Merge content from Source article. This step is in order to conform with licensing requirements. Delete all the text from the source page and save with an edit summary eg. Merge content to Destination article.

If the entire source article is merged, replace it with 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.

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.