User:Wbm1058/Analysis of merging processes on Wikipedia
Evolution of merging, analysis preliminary to merging Project Merge
The backlog here remains a tough nut to crack. One problem is that the WikiProject isn't setting a good example, as we have pages that themselves need to be merged. Merge discussions are ongoing at three other venues besides this one:
I'm posting here as this is the new umbrella talk page for covering the others. I'm taking a look back to the very beginning, to see where things went off the rails and try to get them back on track.
Birth of merging, as a listing page for "Duplicate articles"
The concept of merging was born July 31, 2002 on Wikipedia. A new link Wikipedia:Duplicate articles, which is what Wikipedia:Proposed mergers was originally called, was added to the To Do Lists section of Wikipedia:Utilities— which was later moved to Wikipedia:Topical index (diff). Note the many red links on that diff. At the time, apparently much of project namespace was still in mainspace. I believe these items were later moved to project space without leaving a redirect. The first version of Wikipedia:Duplicate articles had just a single merge item on it. You need to go back to Nostalgia Wikipedia to find the item's origins. Crimean war was created 13:13, 10 December 2001. User:Conversion script logged its phase II conversion edit at 15:51, 25 February 2002. The article was rewritten and expanded 09:38, 6 March 2002, just prior to the introduction of perhaps the first unintentional content fork—or at least the first reported content fork, Crimean War at 15:51, 30 March 2002. This fork went unreported for four months, but then was merged by a different editor just an hour and a half after it was reported, without attribution – which is understandable since the only guidance given was Wikipedia:Naming conventions and Wikipedia:Canonization.
A couple weeks later, someone listed a merger item over at Wikipedia:Pages needing attention, under Articles that have good information, but need work for some reason: (diff) – Black Metal and Black metal music. This was either half a cut-and-paste move or an intentional content fork (it's not clear which), as the creator of Black Metal had just edited Black metal music the day before. In any event, three days later Black Metal was redirected to Black metal music. Eventually Black metal music moved to Black metal.
At 09:48, 20 September 2002 and 09:58, 20 September 2002, Duplicate articles became a "subpage" of Wikipedia:Pages needing attention, which in turn was a subpage of Wikipedia utilities.
By the end of September, after its first two months of operation, the list had grown to five items, when it was decided to remove merged items from the list rather than mark them as "DONE" (diff).
By the end of November, there were 13 items listed, and a short discussion had spontaneously developed around one of them.
At 16:59, 14 January 2003, the first suggestion to tag articles with "boilerplate text" is made, but no templates yet. 16 items on the list.
At 20:34, 25 January 2003, three items are spun off into a new Some other articles that were duplicates and still need consolidation: section. It's unclear what this means, but it seems that some of these needed a history merge. ({{db-histmerge}}). Or an editor just dumped text from one article to the bottom of another article (diff), asking someone else to "please merge". As yet, it seems there is still no official guidance on how to merge.