View source for User:Ianweller/Wiki tip for the week of Jan 26 2009: Moving pages with ease

{{User:Ianweller/Wiki tip of the week header}}

With the [[Help:Wiki structure|new page naming and wiki structure policy]] in place, a lot of users on the wiki have recently been moving pages around, and often have been doing it the manual way: copy the source from one page to another, and make a [[mediawikiwiki:Help:Redirects|redirect]] by hand. What most users apparently don't realize is that there is a move button at the top of every page, and any logged-in user can use that button.

[[Image:Wiki move button.png]]

[[Image:Wiki move prompt.png]]

When moving your page it's a very good idea to give a reason for doing so. You can also choose to move a page's corresponding discussion page along with it too, if it has one. This is very useful for archiving pages (simply tack on ''Archive:'' at the beginning of the page name) or moving your old pages. And of course, please [[metawikipedia:Help:Watching pages|watch your pages]].

:'''Using the move tab automatically creates a redirect and can also fix other redirects to prevent [[wikipedia:Wikipedia:Double redirects|double redirects]].'''

Probably the most important part of using the move tab instead of a manual move is that page histories are kept across both pages, so it's much easier to find who edited what and when.

However if the new page already has content (perhaps a #REDIRECT), MediaWiki won't allow you to move the page (unless you have the power to delete pages). You'll still need to move the page by hand, in this case.

'''Learn more:''' [[metawikipedia:Help:Moving a page|Help:Moving a page]] at meta.wikimedia.org