Merging Pages

When merging two Physiopedia pages, it is importnat to preserve the page history of both articles. This is done rarely but if needed, the instructions are provided below. Full administrator status is necessary to view the Move and Delete tabs to perform all of these commands.

1. Identify the two pages to be merged. For simplicity let's call them "Merge Target" and "Merge Source". Merge Target will become the final name of the page.
   
2. Determine which page will become the Merge Target by selecting the page with the shorter, simpler name that more people will search for. When in doubt choose the article which has more page views since that one may be linked more frequently on other websites.
3. Move all of the good ideas from Merge Source into Merge Target. Edit Merge Target just as you would a regular article.
4. Copy the content of Merge Target as wikitext and paste it into Merge Source.  Both pages should now have exactly the same content on them.
5. Find all of the articles that link to the Merge Source (Toolbox: "What Links Here"). Change the link on those articles to point to the Merge Target.
6. Delete Merge Target.  Before you delete Merge Target make an exact copy of the page name.
7. Move Merge Source to the Merge Target (the one you just deleted) name.  Make sure you type the Target name exactly by pasting the name that you copied in the previous step.
8. Undelete Merge Target by typing http://www.physio-pedia.com/Special:Undelete/Merge-Target except with the "Merge-Target" replaced with the title of the article you deleted.
9. Make sure you select the correct version out of the list! The correct version is the one you want to keep, the Merge Target, the article you deleted and undeleted.
10. Click Restore.
11. Confirm that the page and page history of the new page now contain the authors of all previous versions of both pages and the content shows as you wanted it.  
12. If present, remove the merge template.