Help:How to move a page

For detailed guidance on how and when to move a page, see Wikipedia:Moving a page.

In Wikipedia, a page can usually be renamed if the 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.

The move option in the Vector skin appears when you move your mouse cursor over the small drop-down menu, shown here. (Other users may not have the "TW", which is the optional gadget, Twinkle).

A common example: moving a userspace draft into place. The intended article name is entered without any prefixes.

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. Choose the "move" option via the icon near the top of the page you would like to move. In the default Vector skin, this is in a drop-down menu to the right of the screen, after "History" and the "Watchlist" star (see picture). 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, and only administrators can move it. You can ask for the page to be moved at the move request page.
2. Click "Move" on the drop-down menu.
   • Choose the appropriate namespace prefix from the drop-down box. For pages in "main" Wikipedia space (i.e. articles), choose "(Article)".
   • Enter the new name of the page under "To 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).
3. 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). However, if you're an administrator, you can suppress the redirect.
4. 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 copied to the new page, and this will 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.

Please perform appropriate post-move cleanup after a successful move, as needed.

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). 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.

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