: What is the best way to go about merging these pages? Any ideas you
: experienced wiki gurus?

: I see that the 'ForwardStroke' page magically redirects to the 'Forward
: Stroke' page so somebody must have done a merge of two pages in the past.

Peter,

This is a trick that Shawn showed me and it works well.

As to why those pages exist in duplicate, well, many of us when writing on a topic blythly encircle nice little phrases which could use an encyclopedic page in double square brackets. Sometimes we do not search to see if something similar already exists. One of the ways that a Wiki term can be automatically added is by typing a word with a capital letter in the middle of it... Then when you look at that page that contains the midcapital letter it has a blue question mark next to it... Then someone goes out and defines the page it points to... The same thing happens when you encircle the phrase in double square brackets. The page has this term with a little inviting blue question mark just begging to have the next reader write an article on it... So we get similar pages on similar topics and sometimes what is written on each page is useful, but usually not.

If you, as an editor (we all are) note something like this, you can fix the problem in several ways. It certainly is possible to take the information from one of the pages and (using ctl-c) copy that info over to the other page... then delete the information on the first page. Only problem is that somewhere else on Wiki something referred to the page, or it would not have been defined to begin with... so you go out and find all the references to the term you want to remove and change all of them to the preferred term... Or if you are just a tad bit lazy (like me) you redirect the page you just emptied to the one you want everyone to really go to...

You build a redirect by editing the now empty page and putting a single line in it. For example, Wiki has a page called Builders. You can see it here: KayakWiki . But on the front menu of Wiki there is an entry for Amateur Builders. It is redirected to Builders and when you choose it it looks like this: KayakWiki . You see the little title at the top? It is a redirected page...

Mechanically this is done by editing the page called Amateur Builders and putting this as the only thing on the page:

#REDIRECT page inside double square brackets...

that is, instead of typing "page inside double square brackets" you type two left square brackets the name of the page (here Builders) and then two right square brackets. I could not type that here, because the forum would have interpreted it as a link to Wiki.

OK... If anyone ever wants to undo a redirect, that is another matter, clearly defined on the Wiki directions...

Enough already... If I have made a muddle of this, Nick or Shawn will undoubtably chime in or you can ask further questions..

Or maybe they have been writing their answer during the last 20 minutes while I have been working on this one... it happens!

Rick