How to move a page.

Gonna make a new how to for the newbies. Request a sticky when it's done.

So, you need to move a page, but you're not sure on the how. That's where this quick guide comes in. Unfortunately, we don't have an auto mover tool available to the general public, and all wiks will need to be changed by hand anyway. Regardless of why a page is being moved, most of the procedure is the same regardless of whether it's a rename, a namespace migration, or a Trope Transplant. Our example is going to be a namespace migration from a Main page to a Video Game namespace. Ads have been disabled for visual reasons and screen shots have been cropped to show important components. All scaled images are clickable to an Image Shack unscaled version.

Opening pages.

So, to start with, open the original article's source page in one tab, and the new page in another. To open a source page, go to the button cluster at the top of the page and click the "source" button in the lower left hand corner.

To open the new, unmade, page either modify the url (this will be shown later) or create a link in the Sandbox that you can click. In this case, the link would be VideoGame.{{Mabinogi}} which will give us VideoGame.Mabinogi (a / can be used instead of a period if you wish to hide the Name Space).

Moving text.

The source page should look like this:

◊

Next, you'll need to highlight all the text*

and copying it*

^{you can do this with "ctrl" and "c" or through the context menu(pictured)}

:

Switch to the new page and click the edit button in the "button cluster", it is located in the bottom center-right of the cluster next to the "history" button.

You will now paste the resulting text block on the new page*

:

After pasting and double checking that the code seems right, fill in the "edit reason" space with something along the lines of "Moving page" or "trope transplant" or something else so people know you're not vandalizing the page or some such:

Clicking the "preview" page will show you a what the page will look like on the standard screen resolution, it is wise to use this feature. Once the page is properly formatted, click the "save" button which will finish the page. It should look like a normal page now.

Moving and soft splitting subpages:

In much the same way as moving a page to a Namespace, you will be copying and pasting the contents over. However, in the case of our example, there are two works with the same name, leading to shared subpages. You can either hard split them, or soft split them. We are going to soft split these pages. Now, one of them does not have a characters sheet yet, but we're setting one up preemptively to keep the tropes separate and make it all nice and pretty.

For our example, we're going to be looking at a Characters page. Change the "source" page from the main page to the characters page source using the same technique as finding the source of the original page.

Go to the address bar and change the current namespace to the appropriate subpage (characters in this case).

=>

Then hit enter and it should take you to a standard blank page.

You should now have a source page for the original characters and a new, blank, characters page.

Edit the blank source page by adding some highlighted labels for which work the section is for:

Copy over the information from the source page:

Click save and view the page to make sure everything fits properly:

Moving discussion and other non standard subpages.

There's no way to move the subpages such as Discussion or YKTTW properly, so you'll want to notify the moderators with a forum holler."Hollering" is the system to report a forum post (for being a spam bot or other things that you think the mods want to find out about). When you holler it sends a forum post to the "holler thread" in the super secret mod forum (where the mods plot world domination, swap kitten cooking recipes and what not).

For our purposes, we're using it to get a pages discussion moved so we can turn it into a redirect or disambiguation (which depends on the context).

First, if you're moving a thread in conjunction with a Trope Repair Shop thread, holler from that thread. If you're moving a page to its proper Name Space, use the Namespace Migration Thread and pick a post, it doesn't matter which. For this example, we're using generic entries, and are working from the Namespace Migration Thread. Once there, click the holler button◊:

Now, this will take you to the "holler" screen with a blank post that you can fill in. It automagically has the thread and post selected, so all you need to do is tell the mod in question what you want done (be sure to be polite, the wrath of angry mod is something to fear◊).

Since we're getting the discussion moved on a page that isn't attached, we're including the (made up) source page, [Page X] and the new page that the discussion and the YKTTW need to be pointed at, Namespace/[Page X].

Once you hit send, you will get a confirmation page showing you a copy of what you wanted sent.

Changing wiks.

Now that the pages have been moved, it's time to change the wiks to point to the proper page.

Go to the related to page for the original page, it is the button on the lower right of the button cluster. It will take you to a page that looks like this:

The demonstration will only change one specific wik, the one on the selected page, And Your Reward Is Clothes. After opening the page, I prefer to use new tabs for each page, edit the page and search for the appropriate code using "ctrl" + "f" to search for the text of the page (image edited to show search bar):

Now, replace the entire link with the appropriate one. Ensure that the work title is italicized and the Namespace is hidden*

. Ensure that any single word pages have curly brackets around the name so that they are linked properly.

Do this until all wiks have been replaced. If you run across a blank page, ignore it, it's a bug.

Once the wiks have been cleaned out, the related to page should look roughly like this*

:

At this point, you wait for the moderator to respond telling you that the subpages have been moved. Once this is confirmed you will turn the original page into a redirect so any inbounds*

can find the page they're looking for. Or turn the page into a disambiguation page, whichever is appropriate.

Changing page types.

We've got some basic house keeping, namely fiddling with the page types of the different pages. A slightly different page was used for the screen shots, but the basic steps are the same.

Click the button on the top of the left side labeled 1. This will drop down a list of options, click on the option labeled "set page type" marked by a 2.

You should see a screen resembling the following (actual type will vary depending on what it's set as to begin with. See What Page Types Mean for the various options):

If the page you are making will be used as an index, select the "does indexing" option. Even if it's supposed to become an index.

Redirecting.

Now that you've gotten confirmation that all the pages are set up and moved properly, edit the original page and highlight the entire text:

Instead of copying, you can hit delete or simply start typing your redirect coding:

Once you hit save, it should forward you to the proper page, where you will see the following in the upper right hand corner:

This shows you the redirect name and everything is done. If you were doing this in conjunction with a Trope Repair Shop thread, you can now holler and tell the mods you are done.

edited 3rd Nov '11 12:16:40 AM by Deboss

Fight smart, not fair.

Nice work!

I was going to make a wiki page as well since I think the formatting works on both and it makes sense to keep one of each.

Also, let me know next time we do a ptitle migration, I want to get some screen shots.

edited 6th Jul '11 9:23:59 PM by Deboss

Fight smart, not fair.

Made a wiki page at How To Move A Page, I request that it be put on Administrivia and this thread be stickied.

Fight smart, not fair.

This covers moving a page to a namespace, but it doesn't work for renaming a page or moving a page off of a ptitle, since those require additional steps (mostly to do with subpages).

Rhymes with "Protracted."

Most of the procedure is the same. You just fiddle with the target page. I covered how to move a subpage (characters) and how to ask the mods to move an attached subpage.

Fight smart, not fair.

Question: Why don't we have an auto-move tool available to the general public?

Copy-and-paste moves are frowned on on The Other Wiki for very good reasons, reasons that would seem to still apply here. When you move a page like this, you lose its history completely, which can be a huge pain for people trying to figure out problems with a page or to identify how it has changed over time. (In general, T Vtropes is pretty bad about keeping history, granted, but this breaks it completely every time there's a move.)

There's no way to move pages without losing the edit history?

The edit history is actually still there under the old name, if you have to check it.

Rhymes with "Protracted."

I think the mods have access to an automover.

Fight smart, not fair.

In theory the edit history is still there, yes, but:

1. It's incredibly hard to access (you pretty much have to reverse-engineer the URL), and,

2. Unless you already know that the page was renamed in the past (and what the old name was), you'll have no idea where to look for older edits.

T Vtropes seems pretty bad about keeping old edits in general.

Not that I care, but just saying — losing edit histories might actually be a violation of the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike License, which (as the name says) requires attribution — unless you're requiring anyone who edits to submit their contributions under another license, you can't just discard edit histories beyond 200; you need to maintain constant attribution for every edit on your wiki, forever. I know that the similar rules of the GPL are one of the reasons edit histories are taken so seriously on The Other Wiki.

Even if you don't care about that, it's often a huge pain to try and figure out what's happened on a page in the past. Edit histories are a useful way to see if one particular change to the description suddenly started causing problems, say — or to find out if a change you want to make has been attempted before, and see the results.

Maddy said we should use hollers instead of the notify button, so I swapped out a section of the instructions.

Fight smart, not fair.

Nice job on explaining this, but I got one question. I recently made a wiki page for a fanfic, and turns out said fanfic has a review on the Fanfic Recs section. Is there anyway to transfer that review to the article's review section?

"Yeah, it's a shame. Here we are in an underground cave with all these lasers, and instead of having a rave we're using it for evil."

You could, in theory, copy it over yourself, and some people have done that, but it would be more courteous to ask the original poster. I'd send a PM to the troper in question and give them a chance to re-post it themselves.

Rhymes with "Protracted."

I think there's a specific widget for it, but I'm not sure how it works. I don't know much about the fanfic stuff, anyone care to give me a write up I can drop in?

Fight smart, not fair.