Wikipedia:Text move

For guidance on merging and moving pages, see Wikipedia:Merging, Wikipedia:Moving a page and Wikipedia:Copying within Wikipedia

This is an essay. It contains the advice or opinions of one or more Wikipedia contributors. This page is not an encyclopedia article, nor is it one of Wikipedia's policies or guidelines, as it has not been thoroughly vetted by the community. Some essays represent widespread norms; others only represent minority viewpoints.

A text move alters the position of text at Wikipedia. It can be done in a single operation within an article or article section.

Text move can also mean that a portion of text is moved to another page, for example to the related talk page. It involves two steps:

• cutting a passage of text from an article;
• pasting the text into the other page.

Editors attempting text moves should not ignore consensus nor copyright obligations under the GFDL nor other guidance (e.g. avoidance of cut and paste moves of pages per WP:MOVE), nor try to force their changes by edit warring.

In some cases^[which?], it is recommended to move unwanted text to the talk page of the same article, as something of a "backup". This way, the text is not deleted and is still easily accessible, while the article page itself will still be cleaned.
On one of the Wikipedia guideline pages, it has been suggested that text that is identified as apparent nonsense can be moved to the talk page. But this is often unnecessary and is just one of the ways of dealing with nonsense text.