User talk:Debunct/read

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moving pages
G'day Debunct,

welcome to Wikipedia! I noticed your edits to Soccer New South Wales and thought I'd point something out about renaming articles on Wikipedia. If this sounds a bit too much like a lecture, please let me know.

It all started when Wikipedia was just a teeny little baby, and certain individuals who shan't be named decided to license its content under the GNU Free Documentation License. Now, one of the requirements of the GFDL is that all authors be credited. As a result, all our articles include an extensive "history" section, explaining which changes were made by which users. We go to great pains to ensure that this history remains intact over time. Let's say I came across an article named "cta", which discussed a certain domesticated member of the family felidae; it's plainly obvious that the article should be named "cat". What do I do?

You'll note that most articles have a "tab" (along with "discussion", "history", etc.) that says "move" &mdash; if they don't, fear not, it usually appears after someone's been contributing for a short while. What "move" does is rename the article properly, transporting the history section along with it, and creates a redirect at the original name. There's another method for moving, known as "cut and paste moves", which you used on New South Wales Soccer (but, fair's fair, quickly undid). While these two methods may look the same, cut and paste moves don't move the history into the new article name ... and that's a Bad Thing under the GFDL.

Hope that's clear enough, and please contact me if you need any help with article movies. Cheers, fuddlemark (fuddle me!) 16:38, 21 February 2006 (UTC)