Template talk:Merged-from

Date
I suggest the user can stablish a period of time the note about the merging is displayed. If none has been stablished by the user, one can show it during 2 months. --Altermike 06:27, 1 May 2007 (UTC)

I'm not sure time-sensitive information is entirely supported by template coding. But at the least, this template needs a "date" parameter. --Stratadrake 11:23, 2 May 2007 (UTC)

I added a link to the merged article's talk page in this template. Feel free to revert it if you don't like it (it took three edits to get it right). —Celtic Minstrel (talk &#x2022; contribs) 20:26, 6 December 2007 (UTC)

As a mere dabbler in wikitemplates myself, I know exactly what it's like to make three edits to do just one seemingly minor, innocuous thing. --Stratadrake (talk) 05:01, 8 December 2007 (UTC)

Nested version?
I would love to see a nested version of this template - "This article has had material from the following articles merged into it (show)." Articles like Technology in Stargate would have much tidier talk pages then! Don't have a clue how to make one; don't know if that would somehow violate GFDL concerns either, but it would be nice!--otherlleft 14:02, 16 January 2010 (UTC)
 * I had wondered if there were any Talk pages like that. A "multi" template shouldn't cause any problems, as it's the same information in a condensed format, but hiding entries might not be allowed. Similar templates include and  – maybe the new template could cover those also.  and  are possible starting examples. Flatscan (talk) 04:41, 17 January 2010 (UTC)
 * I wrote . Flatscan (talk) 05:48, 8 February 2010 (UTC)

"That page has been deleted."
I missed this change from December 2009. I think it would be more appropriate to add a maintenance category if the source page does not exist. Some action needs to be taken: undelete page, update parameter (page move), or removal of this template. Flatscan (talk) 05:04, 18 January 2010 (UTC)

Sad news about the singular of "contents"
Contents is like news: its a non-countable noun, and despite the S on the end, it is not the plural of a singular noun, and takes a singular verb. I suppose correcting bad grammar in a deprecated template is pretty pathetic, but there have been new invocations of it added since the deprecation notice went in. --Jerzy•t 04:54, 22 July 2011 (UTC)

Merged4
The documentation recommends both this template and Merged4, without explanation. The latter redirects here. --P64 (talk) 13:30, 15 August 2015 (UTC)
 * Kind of meta 😂 Shushugah (talk) 23:32, 8 September 2018 (UTC)

Should this template ever be used on category talk pages?
This template is currently used on 6 category talk pages (e.g. Category talk:Rock reliefs). (Presumably) the template wasn't written with the intention to be used on such pages and hence (as it doesn't insert the extra colon) it places the talk page in the article category. Should we (1) change the template documentation to make clear that it's not for use on category talk pages, (2) change the template code to not mis-categorize if it is used on a category talk page, or (3) do both? DexDor(talk) 12:37, 30 December 2015 (UTC)
 * I've changed the template to work correctly if used on a category talk page. DexDor(talk) 16:23, 29 January 2016 (UTC)

"Its history" should link to the page's history of the specified date
This would be userful especially for newcomers and heavily edited articles. But it also makes thing a lot easier & quicker.

So if the date is set to 26th July 2016 the "its history" wikilink in the template should link to the page's history with the last edit of the day previous and upwards visible. )So for instance 1 edit from 25th July 22 from 26th July and 2 from 27th July.) I'm not sure how you can specify an article-history-link specific to a date though.

--Fixuture (talk) 15:43, 26 July 2016 (UTC)


 * The template does construct a date-range-to= URL parameter based on the specified date. There are no formatting conversions or checking so I'm not convinced this works reliably. ~Kvng (talk) 16:49, 6 January 2024 (UTC)

Feature request: Multiple merged-froms
Currently inside Talk:Program I have two templates which I wish to combine and simplify with something like

I understand when there are multiple dates, it may be unhandy.

Shushugah (talk) 23:36, 8 September 2018 (UTC)
 * I would love to have a combined template for multiple instances of merges from other articles in this way, like Old XfD multi does for AfDs of the article itself. (That template can't be used for this purpose, since it only mentions the article it's on being nominated for deletion, not for another article being AfD-ed and merged into the current article.) Many D&D articles especially tend to have had multiple articles merged into them, so it gets a bit cluttered to have 4+ instances of the Merged-from or Afd-merged-from templates at the top. V2Blast (talk) 23:24, 10 September 2020 (UTC)


 * One possible solution is use banner holder. Use, add the various Merged-from templates on separate lines below that, and then close the banner holder with. I just did this on Talk:Features of the Marvel Universe and while not perfect, I think it helps. &mdash;Carter (Tcr25) (talk) 14:36, 10 July 2023 (UTC)

Template-protected edit request on 19 June 2019
Please change the following code: into. This will fix LintErrors because of the missing italics end tag for date. Tholme (talk) 15:45, 19 June 2019 (UTC) Tholme (talk) 15:45, 19 June 2019 (UTC)
 * Yes check.svg Done -- Red rose64 &#x1f339; (talk) 20:09, 19 June 2019 (UTC)

Template-protected edit request on 28 April 2021
I endorse Fixuture's suggestion above; in fact I came here planning to implement it but then I realized that the template is protected. Can someone please incorporate the following changes?

From please see [ its history] To please see [ its history] —capmo (talk) 03:34, 28 April 2021 (UTC)
 * ✅ * Pppery * it has begun... 16:29, 29 April 2021 (UTC)
 * Thank you, Pppery. Just a last request: the  tag got duplicated at the end, can you please remove one of them? —capmo (talk) 17:19, 29 April 2021 (UTC)
 * Oops, * Pppery * it has begun...  17:20, 29 April 2021 (UTC)
 * your change made ten months ago seems to have caused several pages to report  errors; these are populating Category:Pages with parser function time errors.
 * Talk:Covalent bond demonstrates the issue:
 * doesn't cause an error, but...
 * does. It's not immediately apparent why this happens, as they both use the same format for the date parameter.
 * Documentation at mw:Help:Extension:ParserFunctions. The  can be in any format accepted by PHP's strtotime function. – wbm1058 (talk) 19:08, 22 February 2022 (UTC)
 * It seems to be caused by an extra invisible Unicode character (probably a left-to-right mark) at the end of the timestamp, as Special:Diff/1073443032 fixed it. * Pppery * it has begun... 19:11, 22 February 2022 (UTC)
 * It was indeed a U+200E LRM. That character causes trouble in many forms of Wikimarkup, not just templates, it is certainly not a problem that is specific to this particular template. -- Red rose64 &#x1f339; (talk) 19:32, 22 February 2022 (UTC)
 * It's caused by editors copy-pasting dates from where the MediaWiki software inserts the character, for the benefit of left-to right language wikis (e.g. Arabic). I'm not sure the character ever has a valid use on English Wikipedia and the thought has crossed my mind to have a bot strip them all from any talk pages that have them. My RMCD bot was getting messed up with searches failing when the character got in the way, so I strip the character before searching the page. Right now I just report them to my console, and then sometimes I later manually strip them from the page. To date nobody has yet to complain about my manual stripping, so I think making my bot strip them when found would not cause problems or be controversial.
 * This template could be upgraded to strip, and thus ignore the character, and thus not generate errors. Just use Module:String. – wbm1058 (talk) 20:11, 22 February 2022 (UTC)
 * As per the text at the top of Category:Pages with parser function time errors, "These can be time-consuming to track down, as often the problem is bad input to a template that's unrecognized by the template because it does insufficient checking of its input parameters." – wbm1058 (talk) 20:53, 22 February 2022 (UTC)
 * As per the text at the top of Category:Pages with parser function time errors, "These can be time-consuming to track down, as often the problem is bad input to a template that's unrecognized by the template because it does insufficient checking of its input parameters." – wbm1058 (talk) 20:53, 22 February 2022 (UTC)

Placement?
Does this template go at the top of the talk page? I saw at Talk:Brownie (camera) that it was placed in the middle of the page. Rublov (talk) 16:15, 23 December 2021 (UTC)
 * Per WP:TALKORDER it goes before the first heading, after the WikiProjects. -- Red rose64 &#x1f339; (talk) 19:32, 23 December 2021 (UTC)

Template-protected edit request on 27 July 2022
Please add  on a new line directly after the opening. This adds the  class for use with bots and scripts. Chlod (say hi!) 12:08, 27 July 2022 (UTC)
 * ✅ — xaosflux  Talk 14:38, 27 July 2022 (UTC)

Date parameter
The template has two separate date parameters, the second (unnamed parameter) and date. It is probably too late to remove date so they should be aliases somehow or we need to document the function of both parameters. ~Kvng (talk) 16:58, 6 January 2024 (UTC)
 * The second positional parameter is for the date when the merge took place, it is useful for several reasons, such as providing a jump-in point for the history link, and thus should always be supplied. The undocumented parameter date is for the date that the tag was added to the talk page. I don't see this as particularly useful; few other talk page banners are so dated. -- Red rose64 &#x1f339; (talk) 13:59, 7 January 2024 (UTC)
 * @Redrose64, thanks for the clarification. date puts the supplied date in parens at the end of the message so it wasn't clear to me what that is timestamping. I agree this is not typically useful (or clear) so it makes sense that it remain an undocumented parameter. ~Kvng (talk) 15:08, 7 January 2024 (UTC)