Help:Moving a page

da:Wikipedia:Hvordan flytter jeg en side pl:Wikipedia:Zmiana nazwy strony zh:Wikipedia:如何重新命名一个页面

There are several possibilities for why you will want to rename a page (one that you have found or created):

The title has been misspelled.
The title does not follow the naming conventions.
The scope of the article has been reduced, extended or otherwise changed.

How to

Note that you have to be logged in to rename a page this way; regarding the set preferences:

there is no button for this in the nostalgia skin;
the button is in the quickbar, so this must be on.

When you've got your article up, click on the "Move page" link in the sidebar. You'll be asked for a new name for the article, and given the option to also move the article's talk page. (Unless you know what you're doing, it's safest to say yes.) Click the "move page"and the page will be renamed to the new title. The old title will become a redirect page, so any links to the old title will still go to the new page. However, note that double redirects (pages that redirect to the original article), will not automatically follow to the new article, so you will have to refer them manually. (as explained below)

Notes

The "move page" function keeps the entire edit history of the article, before and after the move, in one place, as if the article were always named that way. So, it's preferable to use this method over just cutting text out of one article and pasting it into a new one; old revisions, notes, and attributions are harder to keep track of it you do that. (But you may have to if, for instance, you're splitting a page into multiple topics. If you do, please include a note in the new article's summary and talk page of where you took the text from.)

The move itself is shown in the edit history of the page with the old title. However, if the page is moved back, the edit history of the page with the previous title shows the latest move only, with the corresponding user name, but with the date and time of the first move(!).

If the new title already exists and isn't just a redirect with no history, the wiki will tell you that you can't rename the article. You'll either have to manually merge the two pages together, or -- only if there's no real content in the page -- ask to have it deleted to make room for moving the page.

Another thing to remember is that redirects to redirects aren't automatically followed (this prevents infinite loops and spaghetti linking). Always check the What links here for your page, and if there are multiple levels of redirects, go fix the links to point to the new location directly. But this can be troublesome because your new moving might be undone (see below) soon. Take some time to make sure there is no objection to your moving.

It is useful to copy the message "Page ... moved to ..." to the new talk page, especially if there has been discussion about the name of the page.

Known bugs

If a page is moved while someone has that page, or its talk page, open for editing, then weird stuff can happen. We reckon this is all fixed now, but keep an eye out.

Sometimes moves leave the talk page behind, even when you've asked for the talk page to be moved, and you can see no reason for this. Weird, no? If you care about this, see wikipedia:bug reports.

Undoing a move

Sometimes we move things and regret it later. Normally, to undo a move from page A to page B, simply:

move page B back to page A
list page B (now a history-free redirect) on votes for deletion, or (admins only) just delete it.

However, if page A has subsequently been edited, or the move software is behaving weirdly, only an admin can sort things out:

delete page A (make sure it has no useful history - you may wish to add an explicit author credit on a talk page to compensate)
move page B to page A.
delete page B (should be a history-free redirect to page A)

"Move wars" are highly unproductive, and leave vast numbers of pointless redirects littering the place, which some poor soul will have to fix. keep your cool: don't engage in move wars.

Swapping two pages

To swap pages A and B, including history:

Move page A to page C (previously non-existing)
Move page B to page A (allowed because A is now a history-free redirect)
Move page C to page B (allowed because B is now a history-free redirect)
list C on votes for deletion, or (admins only) just delete it.

Fixing cut and paste moves

Many past renamings took place before the move page function was created by our hard-working developers, and others are done by people not aware of this function. Such manual moves were done using cut and paste As a result, the page history of an article or talk page can be split among two or more different pages.

In some circumstances, administrators are able to fix this by merging page histories.

Warning: this procedure may only be undone by a developer, spending quite silly amounts of time: to undo a merge, every single version has to be manually reassigned to the correct source page. Do not do this if you're not sure what you're doing.

Follow this procedure to merge page histories:

suppose we wish to merge edit history from Alabama/History (old title) into History of Alabama (new title):
Delete History of Alabama, with comment deleting to merge page histories - back soon.
Move Alabama/History to History of Alabama, using the move tool.
undelete the History of Alabama article.
Edit History of Alabama to restore the most recent version.

Also, do not do this if the original page has subsequently been edited: EG:

an article at page A is cut and pasted into page B
page A is subsequently edited to become a disambiguation page.

As the procedure above performs a page history merge, this will result in old versions of the disambiguation page being mixed into the page history of page B, causing thorough confusion. In such a case, just put a note as to the original source of the page, and author credits, on the talk page.