For the benefit of other users of Wikipedia and the MediaWiki software, it is worth explaining that there is no real correspondence between a Wikipedia topic and a Discourse topic. So the joining/merging topics means something very different:
-
Wikipedia never explicitly defines a topic within all its policy and procedures, but it sure has a lot of rules about them. Wikipedia uses the concept of a topic in at least three ways:
- a name for an area of knowledge or subject
- a synonym for a Wikipedia article
- a user search term
Whereas a Discourse topic is a collection of posts of which the first has a topic title.
However, a Discourse topic can have a wiki post and be closed to reply posts so it looks more like a unitary Wikipedia article. -
The Wikipedia data structure operates under a namespace for naming all its webpages in its MediaWiki software. NB Wikipedia actually refers to subsets of the overall namespace as namespaces e.g. 0 = Main/Article, 2 = User, etc.
Discourse does not use such namespaces to structure webpage names. -
Wikipedia article titles have to have unique names and must use Topic-specific naming conventions.
Discourse does prevent duplicate topic names by default but this setting can be disabled.
Discourse has no topic-specific naming convention.
Wikipedia handles ambiguous user search terms by two main mechanisms:
-
Redirects = links from ambiguous terms to the correct article title i.e. essentially where a primary topic can be determined.
Discourse can have manual links but not a redirect from a deleted topic. -
Disambiguation pages = lists various meanings of a term and links to the articles i.e. essentially where the primary topic does not exist or is difficult to determine.
Discourse has no mechanism for disambiguation of terms in user searches.
Wikipedia is also far more concerned about permanent links to provide a record of article development and to avoid breaking external links to their topics. So Wikipedia automatically leaves a redirect when a page is deleted. The MediaWiki software does this automatically to maintain a history.
Discourse does not have any requirement to keep such a record of deleted topics.