MediaWiki Administrator's Handbook/Edit History

Edit History

See also: Meta: Help:Moving a page: Fixing cut and paste moves

See also: Wikipedia:How to fix cut-and-paste moves

See also: Help:Moving a page: Fixing cut and paste moves

WARNING – undoing this procedure is extremely tedious. Please read above links carefully and be sure you actually want to do this – it can get very messy and complicated.

Note that you can only merge or split edit histories – you cannot copy them (without the Duplicator extension), i.e., cannot create two duplicate copies of the same edit history.

Edit histories should generally be merged if pages in the main namespace copy contents from pages in the main namespace of a sister Wikimedia project in order to comply with the GFDL license. For similar reasons if a page in the main namespace is split into several pages such as from becoming big or due to reorganization it is generally a good idea to split the edit history among the new pages.

Some Wikimedia projects may include additional namespaces in which edit histories should be merged or split up.

Old method

Historically, to merge the edit history of two or more pages or to split up the edit history of single page into two or more separate pages you will need to use the Delete and Undelete tools. Follow these instructions to do so. Suppose you wish to merge "Foo" and "Bar" (and maybe "Bar 2") to "Foo".

1. open the page you wish to merge the edit histories into and click the edit link – you will keep this open for a while. ("Foo" → Edit)
2. open a window for each page whose edit history you plan to merge with step 1. ("Bar", "Bar 2")
3. click on the move link of each page you opened in step 2. ("Bar" → Move)
4. enter into the "To new title" field box for each page, the page name from step 1 and confirm deletion of the existing page. (Move "Bar" to "Foo"; confirm delete "Foo")
5. close all windows open in step 2 and open a copy of the page in step 1 in a new window. (Close "Bar", "Bar 2", open a new "Foo")
6. click on the history link and then the view or restore link. ("Foo" → History → View/Restore)
7. confirm you wish to restore edit histories. (Confirm restore "Foo" History)
8. go back to the page and click the edit link. ("Foo" → Edit)
9. copy and paste the contents of the edit box in step 1 into the edit box in previous step. (Copy and paste from old "Foo" to merged "Foo")
10. enter "restored current version" into the summary box and click save page to restore back the current version. (Save!)

Using Special:MergeHistory

A faster method is to simply make use of MediaWiki's history-merging tool. Simply enter the source and destination page in the tool, and then choose the number of revisions you want to history-merge. This method is recommended as it's far less tedious with less risk of getting tangled with deletion and undeletion.