User talk:CJ Melon
October 2023[edit]
Hi, and thank you for your contributions to Wikipedia. It appears that you tried to give a page a different title by copying its content and pasting either the same content, or an edited version of it, into Robert Palmer (singer). This is known as a "cut-and-paste move", and it is undesirable because it splits the page history, which is legally required for attribution. Instead, the software used by Wikipedia has a feature that allows pages to be moved to a new title together with their edit history.
In most cases for registered users, once your account is four days old and has ten edits, you should be able to move an article yourself using the "Move" tab at the top of the page (the tab may be hidden in a dropdown menu for you). This both preserves the page history intact and automatically creates a redirect from the old title to the new. If you cannot perform a particular page move yourself this way (e.g. because a page already exists at the target title), please follow the instructions at requested moves to have it moved by someone else. Also, if there are any other pages that you moved by copying and pasting, even if it was a long time ago, please list them at Wikipedia:Requests for history merge. Thank you. —C.Fred (talk) 21:39, 18 October 2023 (UTC)
- Hi, really sorry about that. I genuinely looked for ages on those redirect pages and could not find a way to move the Robert Palmer disambiguation page to a page that had "(disambiguation)" in its title, because that title was already taken by the redirect page. So I figured this was the only way of doing it, I didn't consider the search history. How would one go about switching the base name of a page to a different page? -CJ Melon (talk) 21:46, 18 October 2023 (UTC)
- You'll need to follow the directions at WP:Requested moves. You'll need an administrator's help because of the deletion of some of the pages along the way. You'll also need to make sure that the singer is the primary topic, which means discussion to get consensus on that. —C.Fred (talk) 22:01, 18 October 2023 (UTC)
- Right, thanks for the info. I mentioned the primary topic thing on the talk page for Robert Palmer (because they definitely are the primary topic) and then saw those move pages telling you to "be bold and do it yourself if you feel the move is uncontroversial". I didn't pay attention to the part about articles already existing at the new target title, apologies. - CJ Melon (talk) 22:15, 18 October 2023 (UTC)
- You'll need to follow the directions at WP:Requested moves. You'll need an administrator's help because of the deletion of some of the pages along the way. You'll also need to make sure that the singer is the primary topic, which means discussion to get consensus on that. —C.Fred (talk) 22:01, 18 October 2023 (UTC)