Help:How to move a page

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This help page is a how-to guide. It details processes or procedures of some aspect(s) of Wikipedia's norms and practices. It is not one of Wikipedia's policies or guidelines, and may reflect varying levels of consensus and vetting.

Shortcuts H:MOVE HELP:MOVE

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. Do not move or rename a page by copying/pasting its content, because doing so fragments the edit history.

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). 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:

1. Go to the page that you want to move. There is no need to click "Edit".
2. 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.
3. 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.
4. 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).
5. 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.