@Lydia_Pintscher 12 support vs 2 oppose, I think it's fine to move on with this.

Question: someone mentioned linking the page for requesting merge in the information message that will be displayed to the user, but I can't find such a page. Do we have a "request for merge" community page?

I don't think there is a specific page for merge requests, but I think the requests for deletions page can be extended to that (deletions requests with "duplicate" as a reason are basically merge requests anyway).

Change 374328 had a related patch set uploaded (by Urbanecm; owner: Urbanecm):
[operations/mediawiki-config@master] Restrict merging rights to autoconfirmed users on wikidatawiki

https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/374328

Is there some time this should be deployed, especially due to https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata:Stable_Interface_Policy#Notification_Policy ? Or can this be deployed at any time?

What error will be shown when for example a user connects a Wikipedia page to one in another language via the client widget? I bet most of those don't have enough edits to be autoconfirmed on Wikidata.

Fine from my side in general given there is community agreement.
But Sjoerd is right. We should check this.

If non-confirmed users try to link two pages with merger needed, we need to display a new page with both old and new item IDs, and a page that merge can be requested (I have created Wikidata:Proposed mergers).

In addition, the merge gadget should either 1. also support reporting a merger to a dedicated page (need small improvement) or 2. be usable only by (auto)confirmed users.

As it's a limitation to the openness of Wikidata, do we need to demonstrate current abuse?

I think that discussion about "should this be enabled" should be off-wiki (and preferably before opening the ticket at phab).

In T174345#3559262, @Urbanecm wrote:

I think that discussion about "should this be enabled" should be off-wiki (and preferably before opening the ticket at phab).

We had the discussion about "should" already, now we need to have one about "how".

That's easy, just remove item-merge and item-redirect from non-autoconfirmed users. Or am I wrong?

In T174345#3559314, @Sjoerddebruin wrote:

In T174345#3559262, @Urbanecm wrote:

I think that discussion about "should this be enabled" should be off-wiki (and preferably before opening the ticket at phab).

We had the discussion about "should" already, now we need to have one about "how".

Actually, the one point is still open in the discussion. Somehow the proposer failed to address it. Really a pitty.

Please let me know as soon as this change will be ready-to-process . Technically it isn't a problem (just remove the rights from newbies and maybe hide the merging dialog).

Note disabling adding link widget will make people confused. The better approach is lead them to a request page if their actions involve item merger.

Change 374328 abandoned by Urbanecm:
Restrict merging rights to autoconfirmed users on wikidatawiki

Reason:
Some concerns were raised, feel free to restore if this will be needed again.

https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/374328

Removing from my radar.

@Sjoerddebruin @Lea_Lacroix_WMDE any idea about the status of this / is it still wanted?

@Sjoerddebruin @Lydia_Pintscher ? :)

I’m not following wrong merges a lot nowadays, but thos sounds like a logical restriction to me (aka following MediaWiki-behaviour).

So the remaining question is how we deal with automatic merges done by the software. I hadn't thought of that but when someone connects two pages on different clients that already have items then the items get merged behind the scenes. What do we do in those cases? Do we let them go through? Do we let them silently fail? Those all don't seem great. Ideas?

Do we have an estimate of the number of automatic merge per month and how many are bad (i.e "reverted"/links split again in separate items)?

In T174345#4972962, @Ash_Crow wrote:

Do we have an estimate of the number of automatic merge per month and how many are bad (i.e "reverted"/links split again in separate items)?

We can probably try to figure that out if we want to / need it