Permissions for allowing users to edit article titles

**ILTK** · September 2, 2008

Right now any user with edit permissions can change the title of an article.

This is a bad idea imo because allowing that will break any incomming links to that article as the article title changes the url to the article.

Wouldn't it be better to handle this like mediawiki? Page titles can only be changed using "move" and when the page is moved a redirect page is created that simply does a 301 "permanently moved" with the location set to new url for the page. This way pages can have the title changed and not break incomming links.

If that's to much then perhaps a new permission in usergroups "allow user to edit title" could be added? It would suck if you had a page that brought in a lot of traffic from inbound linkage and then someone changed the title.

**krela** · September 2, 2008

I agree, an extra layer of protection seems like a wise idea.

**pegasus** · September 2, 2008

This is already default VaultWiki functionality: If you rename an article, a Redirect is created from the old title to preserve old links.

As for the extra permission, this is probably something we can add.

**ILTK** · September 2, 2008

Maybe there's something wrong with my setup then.

I tried the following:

Create an article named: "test article"
Click on edit, changed the title to: "test article changed"

If I click the link from the list of articles in that namespace, I get the new page with the changed title and the title is also changed in the listing, but if I enter the link to the old article that was called "test article" I get a page that says "There is currently no text in this page." and nothing happens, I'm not redirected to the new page with the name "test article changed" so if someone had linked to this page from another site the link would be broken.

In mediawiki, if you change a page title then you can still type in the old url and you will get the new page so the link doesn't break. If you have mediawiki installed you can try to create a page and save it and copy the link, then change the title of the page. Now paste in the old link and you will still get to the page.

Hope I'm explaining this right. The simplest way to deal with it would be a usergroup permission to edit titles as it becomes messy once a title have been changed more than once leaving 1 or more redirects behind.