Okay. So a lot of the pages that existed on both wikis has now been deleted. <Deleted page - archival is completed> has a list of those that are still to be merged - that is to say, that is a list of pages from the OblivioWiki which had the same name as our ones. That list was originally about 1200 articles, and has been whittled down to less than 500. There are still quite a few ones that can be easily removed, yet, before the trouble articles are all that remains. (I.e. the articles which have significant content on both, and are written in completely different writing styles, thus making it difficult to easily merge).
This, though is a problem for later. For now, here's a run down of my priorities with the merge (And feel free to add, suggest a different order etc). This is NOT a finalised version of "we do it this way" :) It is very open to improvements. I am merely trying to get something down as to what should be done, so others can help with it :)
- Get rid of as much of the duplicated pages in an initial attempt. Those that can have content easily added to the other wiki, or those that have a few lines, compared with a fully written and structured article, etc.
- Categories: There are a significant number of categories that are added during any merge. We need to discuss, as a community, which ones we prefer. For instance: Category:Characters (or more accurately or Category:NPCs? There are also a number of other categories that I am unsure if needed. For instance, I don't believe that we need categories for each of the different effect types on Ingredients, such as Fortify Health. Instead, I believe that this list should be on either the page about the effect or on a page such as List of Fortify Health Ingredients. These things (and a lot more) need to start being discussed :) (I added a list on <Deleted Page - rchival is completed> before the merge - I will need to check that there were not any more that were added since then)
- Continue working on merging the remaining pages. Try to find a compromise that incorporates the writing styles of both articles.
- After people have decided upon most of the categories that should be staying - go through and start renaming the categories used in articles. I.e. if we as a group decide that we should use.
- Prior to this, look for articles that may exist using a slightly different name, but are essentially the same thing. (Already started doing this to some extent with the Books list)
- Templates: Necessity causes a number of templates to have been added that may already exist here. (For instance, the deletion template) - Go through, find these, and decide which ones are "better". Then there are ones like the Infobox templates - some of these are BOTH really good, but have features on some that dont appear on others - find a way to include the best of both (I will leave this for someone who knows what they are doing.
- Images: Check the quality of the images with exact names as those that were already on our wiki. (I.e. a high quality, self-made screenshot vs a lower quality, copyrighted screenshot will mean that the second one is not copied over to our wiki, or is deleted and replaced with the second one, whichever the case may be.
- Images - go through and check the list of uploaded images. See if any of them are duplicated, but under a different name (Such images would not show up via the "OblivioWiki:Merge" prefix.
- Templates: Once templates such as the Infobox template have been melded together, go through and add these to the applicable pages - Across the entire series (i.e. the Characters/NPCs infobox - when this is finalised, add the template to ALL Character pages.
- Decide upon the overall structure of pages. For instance, now largely includes a "Summary" section before the book's content, including typical locations where such books can be located. This should, later on, be done across the board, and a list of locations where they can be found should be added to all book pages. (A longer-term project)
- Anything else that needs doing, but I have temporarily forgotten about?
Anyways - as you can see, we will all be busy for a while :) If you want to help with any of these things, PLEASE DO SO. The quicker we get this done - the quicker we can all go back to focussing on Skyrim :)