1

This would be a less complicated tool that would look at the intro of the two titles and allow someone to vote on the merge, yes or no. Much like the NFD Guardian.

2

This discussion got started in IRC and I really don’t want to lose some great ideas!! Please post any ideas or thoughts below.

3

Compare the titles and the Intro. Vote Yes or No for the suggested merge

4

I think this would be a good idea, but a booster or an admin should be able to have access to the tool if it does get created of course.

5

Only make it available to NABers and admins. New users probably won’t have enough understanding of the merge policy to use it properly. Besides, they have enough trouble with RCP as it is, seeing as I often see reverts of edits that shouldn’t have been reverted from there.

6

Perhaps run all of the suggested merges, through the NFD Guardian (not sold on that, just putting it out there).

7

I didn’t say this in IRC, but we could also have an option to merge the articles if the *titles* are interchangeable. We could have two editing windows, one window with the merge target, and the other window with the merge source. An editor could use those windows to merge the info from the merge source into the merge target, and then redirect the merge source to the merge target. Thoughts?

8

I agree with Adelaide.

9

I don’t think intros would have enough information to correctly tell. Most intros are rather lacking (even mine), and it’d take a lot to fix them all.

10

Maybe an option to see the rest of the article, if desired.

11

I think we can at least *start* on this without needing to wait for an engineer to build a tool. The wikiHaus put together this list (thanks @ElizabethD and @Agent86 !): https://docs.google.com/a/wikihow.com/spreadsheets/d/1I5OT-w0eOXhOO_eRkw179OlKhidM-QbUO_nKZnlObaY/edit#gid=1613282207 There are around 3000 articles with the merge template on them. Let’s take the first step and see how many of them are actually duplicates! Remember to JUST LOOK AT THE TITLES for now. We don’t want to end up creating redirects between titles that don’t mean the same exact thing. If the content is misguided, we can always apply an accuracy template or even NFD. Just a refresher: http://www.wikihow.com/wikiHow:Merge-Policy

12

@Krystle Great list! I’ll definitely be doing this, seeing that I’m concerned about the merge problem.

13

@WritingEnthusiast14 Is that you who did a whole bunch of them today? If so, thank you!

14

@Krystle Yes, it’s me. I have a wikiHow email account, but I just chose not to log in.

15

I should have been logged in, but I was working on the list for a large amount of time, and I just did a bunch more. A few problems I was running into were: Some “Target article” link/address names were incomplete, as well as times when the merge target = the target article (letter for letter, hyphen for hyphen). I’ll do some more in the next few days, but I got a big brick out of the page.

16

Thank you @Byankno1 ! Sorry about the target title issue. It seems when the list was pulled up, the target title was cut off after any apostrophe. Feel free to skip those!

17

I just sorted the list so the ones that haven’t been reviewed are at the top. We’ve reviewed around 800 titles! Wow!

18

I ran through all unmarked merge suggestions and marked those I could. I added an asterisk (*) by those entries that seem to have been truncated (in the y/n column). Could someone look at the merge articles and update the target column in the spreadsheet with the article name of merge target called out by the template? *edited to correct my omission.

19

This seems like a great idea to me

20

Thank you @Alabaster ! I just went through and fixed those. It looks like we have 803 articles with misplaced merge tags and 1833 that probably still need merging! Just 312 remain to be reviewed. We’ve made a LOT of progress!