Copy and paste
I haven't seen very many assurances in this discussion, let alone anything sweeping. Nobody is denying the existence of problems. The issue is when we have a discussion about "everything Wikipedia is doing wrong", you tend to attract both good faith and bad faith suggestions. There are a lot of people where their bad experience was something confusing, or working with an out of control troll. But there are plenty of people where their "bad" experience was trying to shove a racist conspiracy theory down someone's throat, or creating an article around terminology that's "huge" on their favorite web forum, or any other number of things that we shouldn't really allow.
That's why having a conversation about "openness", without any other considerations, is as dangerous as having a conversation about "NPOV" in the absence of any other considerations. We have to reject tradeoffs between quality and participation.
Look at this thread. We have someone saying that merging an article is discouraging. Instead of acting like merging -- MERGING -- is some kind of vandalism, why not think a little more critically. The original commenter (with all due respect) doesn't call out the process by name, let alone understand the process and how easy it is to reverse or modify it through ordinary editing. That's not a problem with editors being abusive or hostile. It's not even a problem with new editors, because I would never expect a new editor to magically know how things work. It's a problem with making things on Wikipedia so intuitive and natural that this complaint wouldn't even exist. At a technical level, merging an article should be easier to spot and easier to reverse. It *is* easy. But it isn't *obviously* easy.
We need to fix problems without getting caught in lose-lose tradeoffs. I'm drawing the line at this thread, before someone says "yeah! while we're reforming Wikipedia's restrictive and elitist attitude, we should lock down the ability to redirect articles!"
I'd say that "This is called a merge. Nobody is trying to delete material or steal credit. The point is to organize the material better." is a pretty sweeping statement: in actuality any of a number of things may have happened (including deletion of material, or stealing of credit). This just sweeps it under the rug.
A merge can only be done by an admin, and if it can be reversed, it can be only be reversed by an admin. And, sure, something sold as "merging" can be vandalism. There is no telling if that is the case without examining it on a case-by-case basis. - Brya 05:33, 22 May 2011 (UTC)
I apologize if it's sweeping. But the number of times someone abuses a merge is so rare, and so easy to reverse that it's close to the truth. A merge can be done by an IP. I could go onto any Wikipedia in the world and redirect an article, and copy its contents into the redirect target. Which means it can be undone just as easily. The only times when you'd have a hard time undoing it is when it's actually been a firm decision by a consensus of editors to merge something, in which case it's a good decision, and not some kind of insult.