Sometime you get the name wrong. The name is important. We need a rename that is convenient, safe and useful in both local and distributed cases.
See Rename Ghost Pages for a simplification.
Cases
The desired change might or might not change the slug, the real identity of the page.
The old name might or might not be used in many places. Promulgating the change could be automatic, assisted, or left to the user.
The old name might be the basis of a conversation distributed throughout a neighborhood and tracked via sitemaps. See About Activity Plugin.
The new name might already be used. Should the extant page be clobbered as it is now with fork? (check)
The page may be freshly transported an not yet materialized as more than a ghost. (easy case)
Related
Title & text editor with tools like accept, cancel, and context sensitive help. Detect when title change requires forwarding. ★
We need a search for inbound references. This would be called "who links here" in wikipedia. Perhaps outbound links should be enumerated in the sitemaps.
See Deleting Me Softly.
Mechanism
One might expect to double-click a title to open an editor on the title text.
One might expect to see the old name when looking through history. What is in the action? Maybe they see a link to the old page as they do with fork.
One might expect that deleting the title of a page would delete the page. (really?)
One might expect forwarding information to be left with old names. Unlike the browser, we have write access to the reference and could update it when encountered. (wild!)
Aside: I once joined a SubEthaEdit mass editing which behaved orderly until someone started doing global replaces ... of vowels.
One might expect sitemaps to be revised in the neighborhood cache. (elsewhere too)
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# Accidents Happen
Often we create a page. Start writing and come up with a better page title. It would be nice to grant a page name change on new pages. Either a time period such 10 mins--5 mins to 7 days--is now grace time on WSJ and Disqus comments respectively. More robustly allow page rename before a page is forked Does wiki keep a page fork count (IDK).