Wikipedia:WikiProject History Merge

WikiProject History Merge aims to fix the large numbers of cut-and-paste moves on Wikipedia. Cut-and-paste moves were popular in Wikipedia's early days, when the 'move' functionality was available only to admins. Such types of moves are still commonly done by new and inexperienced users who may be unaware of the move function. Repairing cut-and-paste moves is essential from a legal point of view.

If you see an instance of a cut-and-paste move, consider tagging the target page with {{histmerge}}. In complex cases, you may report it at Wikipedia:Requests for history merge. You may also consider issuing the offending user the {{subst:Uw-c&pmove}} notice.

The project uses AarghBot to discover cut-and-paste moves. The bot breaks the results into pages of 500, where they are uploaded to the wiki. AarghBot is written and operated by Mikaey.

How does the bot work?

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The bot goes through the most recent database dump and looks for redirects. It then looks at the history of the redirect, and determines whether or not the redirect was ever an article in its past. It then looks to see if the redirect became a redirect within 24 hours of the time that the target article first became an article. Finally, it does a comparison to see if the old article text and the new article text are similar enough to be considered reasonably identical.

How can I help?

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Administrators can help by reviewing the pages of the report below. If you see an item that can be considered a cut-and-paste move, please fix it by following the procedures here. Once it is fixed, please remove it from the list. Please note: If you see an item in the report that appears to be a cut-and-paste move, please fix it, even if the source page only had one revision before being turned into a redirect! This will allow AarghBot to find additional related cut-and-paste moves on future runs.

Non-administrators can help by reviewing the pages of the report below. If you see an item that cannot be considered a cut-and-paste move, please remove it from the list, and tag the redirect with {{nahmc|<destination page>}}. This will instruct the bot to disregard this page on future runs.

The reports

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Each list (except the last) initially contained 500 items. Please note – as new versions of the report come out, old pages are overwritten with the new version. Therefore, some pages of this report may contain pages from a previous run. For detailed instructions on reading the reports, see /Reading the Reports.

The current version of the report was started on February 16, 2018 and was apparently finished on January 2, 2019.

As of 20:15, 12 November 2024 (UTC) there are 14,901 items remaining to do.

To do list

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Participants

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Both administrators as well as non-admins are welcome to join the project.

 This user is a participant in
WikiProject History Merge.

Participants may add the {{User WikiProject History Merge}} userbox to their user pages.

See also

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