You’ve picked an article, started in on it, and discovered that it’s getting too long, or one part of it is getting too long. Or, alternatively, you don’t believe can build it up into something reasonably good. If so, rethink the article’s scope. You don’t have to accept what you’re found, when you started on the article, as the definitive boundaries of the article’s scope.
Chapter 13 (When an article gets too long) explains how to spin off a section of an article into a new article. That’s the way to go when a section become too long and is about a subject notable enough for an article of its own. Keep this concept in mind as you work on any article: If a section becomes so long that it unbalances an article, if it’s truly notable and not a collection of minor facts—spin it off.
Say that you’ve starting working on the article Thingabobbery, and you notice that another article, Thingabboberists (about the professionals who do thingabobbery for a living), has a lot of overlap in content. Moreover, there aren’t a lot of articles about one that don’t discuss the other.
Wikipedia has a standard solution for overlapping articles—merge them. Merging is a normal editing action, something any editor can do. You’re not required to propose it to other editors, and you don’t have to ask an administrator to help you do it. If you think merging something improves Wikipedia, you can be bold and just do it. Still, if you think the merger is going to be controversial, then you should propose it (see Proposing a merger) rather than risk starting a fight (and wasting your time) by just going ahead.
Merging is straightforward:
Pick one of the two articles to be the survivor.
In general, choose the better known of the two words or phrases. Using a search engine to see the number of results is a good way to find out.
Cut and paste material from the doomed article to the surviving article. In the edit summary, put Moving content from [[Name of other article]], in preparation for merger.
Only add content that isn’t already in the surviving article. Don’t worry much about getting the wording right—just bring any new material across. When in doubt, copy more rather than less.
Now that you’ve copied what you need, delete all text from the article that isn’t going to survive, and change it to a redirect. Save it with an edit summary like Changing to a redirect; article merged into [[Name of surviving article]].
See Figure 16-11 on page 308 for instructions on doing redirects.
Check the talk (discussion) page of the article that’s now a redirect. If any sections have active discussions (say, ones with a posting in the past week), copy those sections to the talk page of the surviving article.
Include a note at the top of each section, just below the heading, mentioning the merger and the name of the page from which the section was copied.
Note
While you could make the talk (discussion) page of the non-surviving article into a redirect, there’s no harm in leaving it as is. Any editor thinking about posting there is going to notice that the related article page is a redirect.
After the merger’s done, clean up the surviving article. See “Reorganize and Edit Existing Content” (Reorganize and Edit Existing Content) for tips.
If you don’t want to merge two or more articles yourself, propose a merger by placing a merger template at the top of each article. There are different templates depending on whether you propose to:
Merge articles A and B, survivor to be determined ({{merge}}).
Merge article A into article B, with A becoming a redirect ({{mergeto}}, {{mergefrom}}).
Merge many pages into one page ({{mergeto}}, {{mergefrom-multiple}}).
The page Help:Merging and moving pages (shortcut: H:MMP) has details.
Any merge templates you add must link to a section of a single article talk page, where you’ll start a discussion of the proposed merger. Before you post the templates, start that new section on that talk page, explaining your reasons for suggesting a merger. Also add a listing to the page Wikipedia:Proposed mergers (shortcut: WP:PM).
After that, you wait. If you want to speed up the process, you can post a note on the user talk pages of the major or recent contributors to the articles, noting that a merger has been proposed to an article they’ve contributed to, with a link to the article talk page where you posted your reasons.
If there’s clear agreement with the proposal by consensus or silence, then you can proceed with the merger. Consensus means that no one, or a small minority, has opposed the merger; silence means you’ve waited a week and no one has responded. If you get a limited response, with no clear consensus, then consider following the process for content disagreements as laid out in Chapter 10.
Sometimes you just can’t find much information about a topic, or you find a topic that’s only mentioned in the context of a larger grouping. One example would be an article about a small island that’s part of a large, notable chain of islands. If you can find only a couple of newsworthy paragraphs about the small island, or isolated incidents that you really can’t tie together, then consider merging the information about this small island into the article on the chain. Moreover, look at any articles about other small islands in the chain, and consider those for merging as well. And where a small island in the chain doesn’t have an article, consider creating a redirect for it so that editors, in the future, go to the article on the chain.
Of course, in the future there may be a large, newsworthy resort on the small island, and content about it may be spun off from the article about the chain, into a separate article. In the meantime, however, it does readers no good to have a bunch of short articles scattered throughout Wikipedia, when collecting them together could make a reasonable article. Go where available sources of information lead you—don’t create or keep an article just because, sometime in the future, someone may write a book about it and provide content to make it larger.