Editing Incubator escapee wiki:History merging (section)

{{For-multi|information on copy and pasting text|Wikipedia:Copying text from other sources|the WikiProject|Wikipedia:WikiProject History Merge}}
{{Redirect|WP:CUT|the guideline on shortcuts|Wikipedia:Shortcut}}
{{see also|Wikipedia:Requests for history merge}}
{{shortcut|WP:HM|WP:CUT|WP:HISTMERGE|WP:CUTPASTE}}
In the early days of Wikipedia, renamings took place manually, using [[cut and paste]], before the [[wikipedia:How to move a page|move page]] function was [[Mailarchive:wikipedia-l/2002-August/003722.html|enabled for non-administrators in August 2002]].

Cut-and-paste moves still occur today because of unfamiliarity with the move function, unawareness that [[WP:ATTREQ|attribution]] is necessary, or when the move function fails (e.g., because the target has history) and people don't know to use the [[Wikipedia:Requested moves|Requested moves]] forum to start a move request.

When a cut-and-paste move is done, the [[Wikipedia:Page history|page history]] of an article or talk page can be split among two or more different pages. This is highly undesirable, because we need to keep the history with the content for [[Wikipedia:Copyright|copyright]] reasons. (See [[Wikipedia:Copying within Wikipedia]].)

In some circumstances, [[Wikipedia:administrators|administrators]] and [[WP:importers|importers]] can fix this by merging page histories, using the procedure given below.