Problems with moving an article

[Milton Beychok]

Hello, all:

Yesterday I moved an article so as to rename it  The main article was moved but none of the subpages were ... even though I had checked the box asking to have the Talk page moved.

It took me about an hour to find the unmoved subpages (Talk, Related Articles, Bibliography and External Links) ... and then it took me about another hour to copy and paste each of them into the renamed article.

That was just too laborious and took too much time!! Can anyone devise a way to move all of the subpages when moving an article? 

At the very least, the Move page should warn us that the subpages will not be moved and it should tell us how to find the unmoved subpages.

Milton Beychok

[Aleta Curry]

Yes, Mr/Dr Beychok, that does sound like a lot of work.

I think the problem is that the subpages are so new and the MOVE function is pre-subpages, so the TALK page was included because it already existed, but the others weren't there yet.

You're right, if the problem can't be fixed, at the very least people should be warned that the subpages will have to be moved manually.

Could I ask you to be so kind as to link to your userpage in your signature so that we can read about you?

Thanks!

[Milton Beychok]

Aleta:

Here is the link to my user page: http://en.citizendium.org/wiki/User:Milton_Beychok

By the way it is Mr. Beychok and the Talk page was also not moved.

Regards,

Milt Beychok

[Martin Baldwin-Edwards]

I've given up with moving these stupid subpages. As there are no instructions for doing so, I leave it to others who have wasted their time working it out. I don't normally do such things, but when I experimented many things went wrong...

[Warren Schudy]

I've given up with moving these stupid subpages. As there are no instructions for doing so, I leave it to others who have wasted their time working it out. I don't normally do such things, but when I experimented many things went wrong...

There are instructions at the very bottom of the subpages help page (http://en.citizendium.org/wiki/CZ:Using_the_Subpages_template#Moving_an_article_with_subpages), but I have no clue if those instructions are right or not.

[J. Noel Chiappa]

I've given up with moving these stupid subpages. As there are no instructions for doing so, I leave it to others who have wasted their time working it out. .. when I experimented many things went wrong...

Like what?

There are instructions at the very bottom of the subpages help page (http://en.citizendium.org/wiki/CZ:Using_the_Subpages_template#Moving_an_article_with_subpages), but I have no clue if those instructions are right or not.

They are pretty minimal. I'll take a whack at improving it. The biggest problem I forsee, off the top of my head, it finding out if the page had an 'odd' subpages (i.e. not just the usual /Approval, /Bibliography, etc). I think "what-links-here" on the parent shows sub-pages, IIRC... That might be the clue to making it easier; you can just click on each one in turn, and then do the top-level article when all the subpages (except Talk:, which is special-cased) are done.

In the long run, of course, we'll probably want to upgrade our software to move the whole kit-n-kaboodle in one fell swoop.

[J. Noel Chiappa]

There are instructions at the very bottom of the subpages help page (http://en.citizendium.org/wiki/CZ:Using_the_Subpages_template#Moving_an_article_with_subpages)

They are pretty minimal. I'll take a whack at improving it.

I have greatly expanded that section, giving fairly detailed instructions. It should take only a couple of minutes to move an article with a modest (2-4) number of subpages.

Note: I haven't actually tried this complete procedure to make sure it works (don't have anything I want to move :-), but I did try both methods for listing subpages to make sure they worked. The moves themselves should be pretty straightforward.

Noel

[Jitse Niesen]

Yesterday I moved an article so as to rename it  The main article was moved but none of the subpages were ... even though I had checked the box asking to have the Talk page moved.

About two months ago, an option was added to the MediaWiki software which runs the website, that allows you to move all the subpages together with the main article (see http://svn.wikimedia.org/viewvc/mediawiki?view=rev&revision=33565). I think that would be a useful feature for us.

Another potentially useful thing is hidden categories, allowing us to put pages in a category without showing this on the page self. For instance, we could make Category:CZ Live a hidden category; then we can generate a list of all articles that are live, but we won't have the (in my opinion) useless text: "Category: CZ Live" at the bottom of all live articles.

We now apparently have people working on the servers, changing the database. So, are there any plans to update the MW software?