Dominic
"Nolite te bastardes carborundorum" transwiki
editHey folks, we've really made a mess of the transwiki of this neo-Latin proverb. To recap, the following actions occurred:
- On 7 August 2005, Dmcdevit simply moved the transwikied article into Nolite te bastardes carborundorum, despite the fact that quoted text is not itself an appropriate article title.
- On 17 August 2005, MosheZadka merged the information into Margaret Atwood and created redirects from the article and its talk page, but neglected to check for double redirects, something that should always be done when creating redirects (or doing moves). Also, the resulting talk page history statement made it look like what was transwikied was "Margaret Atwood", which was misleading.
- On 20 September 2005, Aphaia fixed the Transwiki: redirects.
When I noticed oddities about the resulting article, I went to Transwiki to figure out what had happened. But not a single change was logged since it arrived in Wikiquote. This is why we have the transwiki log — to untangle these hard-to-track movements and frequent transwiki editing errors and omissions. I've logged the major transactions and added a heading and text to the talk page to clarify where the original material came from.
I know this transwiki stuff is a pain, but until the MediaWiki projects come up with some automated system to get things moved between projects properly, it's important to follow the correct procedures. Whenever processing a transwiki, I highly recommend setting aside 10-15 minutes, reviewing the steps described in Help:Transwiki, logging the changes made, and checking "What links here" for any moved or redirected articles. When you're done, you should not only verify that the transwiki log shows the complete move (preferably by clicking on the links in the log, which will expose broken redirects or misspelled titles), but also read the resulting article and talk pages to ensure they make sense for people who come across them for the first time. ~ Jeff Q (talk) 11:24, 20 September 2005 (UTC)