Wikibooks:WikiProject Little Star/Unmerged transwikis

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Unmerged transwikis, formerly known as bad transwikis, are terms used to refer to a series of pages discovered by JJPMaster on 7 January 2025 that were transwikied from the English Wikipedia before 2010. The thing that unites them all is that the pages were copy-and-pasted from Wikipedia, and a talk page note was posted featuring a plaintext rendition of the page history. This is problematic, since it leads to incomplete page histories and poor attribution.

They are corrected through the following procedure:

Import all revisions of the page from enwiki to a temporary page in the Transwiki namespace
Identify the day that the page was pasted to Wikibooks
Use Special:MergeHistory to move all of the temporary page's revisions from before the day from Step 2 to the page that was already on Wikibooks
Delete the temporary page

To identify any possible unmerged transwikis, you can see this search query. Another less specific but more sensitive query is this one.

If the Wikipedia page mentioned on the talk page of the unmerged transwiki does not appear to exist, please file a request at Wikipedia:Requests for undeletion to have the page temporarily restored. Please note that most of the interwiki links to Wikipedia are incorrect: "en:" links back to en.wikibooks. Instead, put them into your address bar with the "w:" prefix.

Reminder

Most of these transwikis were done using the best technology available at the time, as many occurred before the Special:Import page was introduced, or in cases where that tool did not work properly. Thus, you should not interpret the inclusion of any user's transwiki as a judgment of their morality or competence in any way. Additionally, please note that while the attribution in these instances is not ideal, most of these transwikis are not copyright violations, and can be corrected. Even if an unmerged transwiki cannot be corrected, it can generally be left as it is without outright violating the GNU Free Documentation License.

Log

Below is a log of corrections:

Unrecoverable unmerged transwikis

Some unmerged transwikis were copied from enwiki pages that were deleted at Wikipedia:Votes for deletion before 8 June 2004. If this is the case, then there is likely no way to recover the lost revisions, since all articles that were deleted before then are permanently lost. Please note that just because a source page was created before then doesn't mean that it's unrecoverable—that's only the case if it was deleted before then. And some apparently unrecoverable unmerged transwikis may be recoverable using early database dumps from the English Wikipedia. It is as yet undecided what should be done with these pages. Below is a list of apparently unrecoverable unmerged transwikis:

Cookbook:Grilled Cheese Sandwich

Notes

↑ This case was a bit different from the rest for five reasons: (a) It's a template, (b) There was no talk page note, (c) It occurred after the import functionality was added to Wikibooks, (d) This wasn't a transwiki per se, as the template remains on the source wiki, and (e) It originated from the English Wikisource, not Wikipedia. I'm including it here because the procedure for correcting its problem was the same as the other cases, and it was discovered at the same time.
↑ This was a rather complicated case, since the history of the enwiki page was also incomplete! It turns out that the enwiki page was moved by cut-and-paste from w:Talk:Pasta/How to a few hours after its creation. An administrator on enwiki had to perform a history merge, and then I imported the merged content here on 10 January 2025.
↑ This was the first correction to use a different method that doesn't require selective history splitting like the previous one. Here, I XML imported a modified version of the enwiki page (I changed the title in the file to the title of the enwikibooks page and removed all revisions from before the transwiki), and history merged that into the new page.
↑ This one used a simpler version of the previous method, where I directly XML imported the relevant revisions into the page, with no history merge needed.
↑ Strictly speaking, this is not an unmerged transwiki, since the importing administrator attempted to import and merge the enwiki page, but only imported the most recent revision at the time. I imported the rest.

[1] This case was a bit different from the rest for five reasons: (a) It's a template, (b) There was no talk page note, (c) It occurred after the import functionality was added to Wikibooks, (d) This wasn't a transwiki per se, as the template remains on the source wiki, and (e) It originated from the English Wikisource, not Wikipedia. I'm including it here because the procedure for correcting its problem was the same as the other cases, and it was discovered at the same time.

[2] This was a rather complicated case, since the history of the enwiki page was also incomplete! It turns out that the enwiki page was moved by cut-and-paste from w:Talk:Pasta/How to a few hours after its creation. An administrator on enwiki had to perform a history merge, and then I imported the merged content here on 10 January 2025.

[3] This was the first correction to use a different method that doesn't require selective history splitting like the previous one. Here, I XML imported a modified version of the enwiki page (I changed the title in the file to the title of the enwikibooks page and removed all revisions from before the transwiki), and history merged that into the new page.

[4] This one used a simpler version of the previous method, where I directly XML imported the relevant revisions into the page, with no history merge needed.

[5] Strictly speaking, this is not an unmerged transwiki, since the importing administrator attempted to import and merge the enwiki page, but only imported the most recent revision at the time. I imported the rest.

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[note 4]

[note 5]