Description

When a page is deleted, it is impossible to reuse the name of the page by renaming another page to it.

Steps to reproduce

1. create page FooBar

2. delete page FooBar

3. create page FooQuux

4. try to rename page FooQuux to FooBar

Doesn't work.

Details

This Wiki.

Workaround

To free the name captured by a deleted page:

1. Visit DeletedPage?action=revert&rev=1

2. Rename DeletedPage to some other name that is not needed e.g. WikiTrash/DeletedPage.

Next time, instead of deleting pages, renamed them to WikiTrash/DeletedPage. The wiki admin should physically clean the trash from time to time.

Discussion

I guess the proper way to do this would be to merge FooQuux's revisions "on top" of FooBar. Say we have the original set of revisions like this:

FooBar = [ 1, 2, 3, ..., N, <deleted> ]
FooQuux = [ 1, 2, ..., M ]

Upon merge, the revisions should look something like:

FooBar = [ 1, 2, 3, ..., N, <deleted>, N + 1, N + 2, ..., N + M ]

Is this possible within the new versioning scheme?

AlexanderSchremmer also mentionned that MediaWiki does this properly.

• Yep, and it does neither merging nor moving anything to Trash. But it simply works.

  • Please describe what is does exactly, "simply works" its not very helpful

Its possible to merge the contents of a renamed page with the contents of a deleted page, but in most cases it will not be what the author wanted. The problem here is broken delete page action, that does not free the deleted name. In most cases, when you delete a page, you don't like its contents and want the free the name. If you like the content, you would have renamed the page. This unwanted content should not be merged magically behind the back into other unrelated pages. -- NirSoffer 2005-04-23 09:08:08

No Merging - that is not helpful. Mediawiki does it better.

• And again, a link to the "right" way would help to get it implemented...

  I don't understand why merging is not the "right" way either. Seems the most natural and simplest way to fix this quickly. -- TheAnarcat 2006-09-08 03:03:05

  • Hmm, that's rather complex - you call it merging. But in fact you would need to copy revisions onto other revisions which would violate the rule that makes a list of revisions order by revno automatically ordered by date as well. How do you want to fix that? -- AlexanderSchremmer 2006-09-09 20:13:40

Plan

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• Status:

CategoryMoinMoinBugConfirmed