This help page is a how-to guide. It explains concepts or processes used by the Wikipedia community. It is not one of Wikipedia's policies or guidelines, and may reflect varying levels of consensus. |
On Wikipedia, a page can usually be renamed if the already existing title is incorrect or needs to be changed; this is called moving a page. A page may also be moved to another namespace without changing the base title—for example, a userspace draft may be moved to article space. Autoconfirmed rights are required for page moving, but you may request a page move at Wikipedia:Requested moves if you are not yet autoconfirmed, if there is a technical barrier to the move, or if the retitling is expected to be controversial and you need to seek consensus for the name change.
Files (images and media) can be moved only by Wikipedia administrators and file movers, but moves can be requested.
Category moves should be investigated and planned before they are initiated. Please post requests for category moves at Wikipedia:Categories for discussion if you are, or expect to be, unable to complete the process.
Do not move or rename a page by cutting and pasting its content, because doing so fragments the edit history. Instead, please follow the instructions given below.
Reasons for moving a page
There are many reasons why you might wish to move a page:
- The title does not follow Wikipedia's naming conventions, such as that it is not the common name of the subject or it is overprecise.
- The name of the subject of the article has been changed and the new name has come into majority use.
- The title has been misspelled, does not contain standard capitalization or punctuation, or is misleading or inaccurate.
- It needs to be disambiguated in some way to avoid confusion with an existing, similarly named topic, or it exists at a disambiguated name but should not because it is the primary topic.
- It is an article at a descriptive name and the scope of the article has been reduced, extended or otherwise changed.
- It is an article that has been created as a subpage of a Wikipedian's user or user talk space for development purposes and it is ready to be posted to the mainspace or to draft space.
- It is a draft article that has been created or edited in draft space for development purposes and it is ready to be posted to the mainspace.
Technical restrictions
Technical restrictions prevent the storage of titles beginning with a lowercase letter, containing certain characters, and using formatting such as italics. Templates which may be used as workarounds include:
Wiki markup Transclusion from template: |
Involves | Correct name | Actual article name |
---|---|---|---|
{{Italic title}} | Title in italics | To Kill a Mockingbird | To Kill a Mockingbird |
{{Italic title|all=yes}} | Complete title in italics, including parentheses | Randall and Hopkirk (Deceased) | Randall and Hopkirk (Deceased) |
{{Italic title|string=Ally McBeal}} | Phrase of |string= in italics
|
List of Ally McBeal episodes | List of Ally McBeal episodes |
{{Italic title|all=yes|string=Fringe}} | Phrase of |string= in italics; also looks in parentheses
|
Peter (Fringe episode) | Peter (Fringe episode) |
{{Italic disambiguation}} | Disambiguation in italics | The End (Lost) | The End (Lost) |
{{Lowercase title}} | Lowercase first character | eBay | EBay |
{{Lowercase title|italic=yes}} | Lowercase first character and place title in italics, not including disambiguation | iCarly (soundtrack) | ICarly (soundtrack) |
{{Lowercase title|italic=yes|force=yes}} | Lowercase first character and place title in italics, including disambiguation | ||
{{Lowercase title|dab=yes}} | Lowercase first character and place disambiguation in italics | iSpy (Modern Family) | ISpy (Modern Family) |
{{Italic title prefixed|17}} | Italicize after the number characters at the beginning of the title | German battleship Bismarck | German battleship Bismarck |
Magic word | |||
{{DISPLAYTITLE:_NSAKEY}} | Various | _NSAKEY | NSAKEY |
Title corrections | |||
{{Correct title|reason=bracket}} | < > [ ] { } | Benzo[a]pyrene | Benzo(a)pyrene |
{{Correct title|reason=#}} | # | Pilot #5 | Pilot No. 5 |
{{Correct title|reason=:}} | : | DK: King of Swing | DK King of Swing |
Before moving a page
Consider listing pages that you want to have renamed/moved at Wikipedia:Requested moves. List them at Wikipedia:Requested moves/Technical requests if it appears unlikely that anyone would reasonably disagree with the move, and:
- You are unable to move the page because your account is too new (the account must be autoconfirmed)
- You are unable to move the page because the target page exists
- The page is protected from moves
- The target page is protected from creation
For other cases, follow the instructions for controversial and potentially controversial moves:
- If you believe the move might be controversial
- If you are unsure about the best page name, despite reading Wikipedia:Article naming guidelines
- If you believe your proposed move would benefit from wider community input
Do not move or rename a page by copying/pasting its content, because doing so fragments the edit history. (Wikipedia's copyright license requires acknowledgement of all contributors, and editors continue to hold copyright on their contributions unless they specifically give up this right. Hence, it is required that edit histories be preserved for all major contributions until the normal copyright expires. See also Wikipedia:Copying within Wikipedia.)
If you find a cut-and-paste move that needs to be fixed, please follow the instructions at Wikipedia:Requests for history merge to have an administrator take care of the problem.
If you need technical help in a simple page move situation which is blocked by history at the target of the move, list the page at Wikipedia:Requested moves/Technical requests following the listing procedure outlined there.
How to move a page
Parts of this Wikipedia page (those related to this section) need to be updated. The reason given is: Description and images don't quite match WP:VECTOR2022. Please help update this Wikipedia page to reflect recent events or newly available information. Relevant discussion may be found on the talk page. |
To be able to move pages yourself, you must be logged in and you must have an autoconfirmed account (i.e., generally you must have had the account for four days and made at least ten article edits with it). Moreover, the move will fail if a page already exists at the target name, unless it is simply a redirect to the present name that has never been modified, in which case you can move over the redirect (check the edit history). If you cannot move a page yourself because of a technical restriction, and you expect the move to be uncontroversial, you can list it at the technical section of requested moves. Otherwise, you can make your request at its section for controversial and potentially controversial moves.
To move a page:
- Go to the page that you want to move. There is no need to click "Edit".
- Locate the "Move" option at the top of the page.
- Most users will find the "Move" option in a drop-down menu at the top right of the screen, labelled "More", after "History" and the "Watchlist" star (see picture). It may be under a menu labelled "Page" if you have enabled "MoreMenu" at Special:Preferences#mw-prefsection-gadgets.
- The layout of the screen will be different if you have selected a "skin" other than the default Vector in your preferences. In the Monobook skin, it is a tab at the top.
- If there is no "move" link at the top of the page at all, the page is most likely protected from moving. Ask for the page to be moved at the technical move request page.
- Click the "Move" option, and fill in the details of your move.
- If the page is for the main encyclopedia, choose "(Article)" from the drop-down box. Otherwise choose the appropriate namespace prefix.
- To the right of the text box, enter the new name of the page as the "New title".
- Give a reason for the move (which is like an edit summary). Although filling out the "Reason" field isn't required, you should state a reason for the page move.
- Choose whether to also move the page's talk page (this box should usually be left checked). This box is not present if the page has no talk page.
- When ready, click the Move page button and, if successful, the page will be renamed to the new title. The old title will become a redirect page, so any links to the old title will still go to the new page. However, note that double redirects (pages that redirect to the original page), will not automatically follow to the new page, so you will have to refer them manually (as explained at How to fix a double redirect and Checking for double redirects).
- A successful page move will be recorded in the Move Log (against the old page name) and a "move has succeeded" message will be displayed, on a page looking like this: MediaWiki:Movepage-moved.
- If the old page was protected, its protection settings will be generally automatically copied to the new page, and thus be recorded in the Protection Log (against the new page name). If Pending changes was enabled, the settings will be moved but they will not be logged against the new page title.
How to move a category
Most users lack permission to move pages in the category namespace. ("Only administrators, page movers, and bots can move Category pages.") (Conveniently, the Move button is not displayed.)
To request the move, follow the procedure at Wikipedia:Categories for discussion § Speedy renaming and merging.
For those permitted to move categories
It is recommended to follow the procedure at Wikipedia:Categories for discussion § Speedy renaming and merging, and let a bot handle it, especially for complex cases.
Moving a category manually is possible, but it requires significant post-move cleanup, and can be time-consuming. A category move is not complete until the old category contains only the soft redirect and no pages.
To move a category manually:
- Move the category page (description wiki markup).
- Change all of its subcategories. (Change the category of each subcategory to the new category.)
- Change every page that is listed in the old category to the new category:
When pages are listed in a category that is not shown in the wiki-markup, this most likely means that a template placed on those pages is adding the category. When the category is moved, the template must also be changed. After the template is updated with the new category, the pages with the template are automatically placed into the job queue and will eventually be updated with the new category. If there are a very large number of pages transcluding the template(s), the process of updating all pages through the job queue may take days, weeks, or even months to complete. Protected pages or templates may require elevated privileges to accomplish the change. In such cases, the normal protected edit request process should be followed. Depending on the number of templates and articles that require elevated privileges to edit them, it may be more appropriate to involve an administrator from the beginning of the process (see Wikipedia:Categories for discussion).
Post-move cleanup
After successfully moving a page, you should be prepared to perform any of the possibly resulting clean up tasks described at WP:POSTMOVE. Some of the most commonly required tasks are:
- Updating the article prose (including the first sentence) to use the new name
- Updating any navigational templates to link directly to the new title, rather than via a redirect
- Fixing any mistargeted wikilinks resulting from the move (only required for certain moves, such as when an article's title is usurped by a disambiguation page)
Page histories
The "move page" function keeps the entire edit history of the page before and after the move in one place, as if the page had always been named that way.
The move itself is recorded in the edit histories of both pages. This feature was introduced in MediaWiki 1.5 in 2005. It does not work retroactively, so older moves are only recorded indirectly, in the page history of the old page name.
You should never just move a page by cutting all the text out of one page, and pasting it into a new one; old revisions, notes, and attributions are much harder to keep track of if you do that. (But you may have to if, for instance, you're splitting a page into multiple topics. If you do, please include a note in the new page's edit summary and talk page stating where you took the text from.) Also see #Fixing cut-and-paste moves below.
Moving redirect pages
A page that is a redirect can be moved like any other page, although it is rarely useful because it has the same detrimental effect on page history as copy-pasting content to a new page, and making the old page a redirect: when moving a redirect page to a new page name, the redirect on the old page (now directing to the new redirect page) will have to be altered in order to avoid double redirects. So the content of the old page will no longer redirect to the page containing the history of that old page. The effect is that the whereabouts of the page history of the old page (now seemingly a "recently created page") are a bit trickier to find, while on the other hand the new page has a history attached to it not clarifying why it would need to be a redirect page. However, if a redirect page has to be evacuated (for example, to reuse its title), but contains a valuable edit history, then it should be moved (unless merging of history is suitable).
If a redirect page does not redirect to the page it would need to be redirecting to, then the only viable strategy that respects page histories is to adapt the redirect on that page, without moving the page.
Moves where the target name has an existing page
Non-administrators cannot complete a move where the target page exists (except sometimes over a redirect). If the user is not a page mover, moving the existing page out of the way will not help, as it leaves behind a redirect which cannot be overwritten either. Administrators can delete a page and move another page to the deleted name, in one step. Page movers can move the target page to a new location without leaving a redirect, move the intended page to the target page, and optionally request deletion of the moved page.
If the new title already exists and isn't just a redirect to the old title, with no history, and you are not an administrator, the wiki will tell you that you can't rename the page. If this happens, list the move at Requested moves, or (if the replacement of the existing page merits further discussion) nominate the existing page for deletion (typically via Articles for deletion).