Obsolete and Duplicated Documentation Pages

As Drupal evolves, pages become obsolete. Also, sometimes people create several pages with duplicate content or nearly duplicate content.

There are several methods for dealing with these issues in the online documentation, they are list in order of preference.

Obsolete or Outdated pages/sections

Method 1: Evolution

The preferred method for dealing with obsolete pages is to update them so that they have current information.

If a page has information for an end of life Drupal version or extension, update it to include information for currently support versions. When a version is no longer supported, remove the outdated information. In this way, a page evolves so that it is always up-to-date information for the currently-supported versions.

If someone really needs to see the old information, it will be available in the revision log.

Method 2: Archive

Use this method when the differences between versions of Drupal or extensions are large. So large, that it makes more sense to have a separate page or section of documentation describing each version.

If that is the case, then you might, for instance, have Drupal 10, 11 and 12 versions of the page (or section).  And eventually the oldest versions of the page/section will be about versions that are no longer supported.

In this case, you should do the following:

1. For each obsolete page in the section
   1. Update the page title so that it starts with OBSOLETE.
   2. Add a note at the top of the page explaining that the page is obsolete, and linking to a more current page.
   3. Update the "Page status" value to "Deprecated".
2. Be sure to save all these changes to each page.

Note that ancient archive book pages may eventually be unpublished and/or deleted.

Duplicate pages/sections

If there are several pages with substantially the same information on them, they should be consolidated into one page with a redirect.

In this case, you should do the following:

1. Choose the page whose content is better written or more complete as the "primary" page. Other pages with duplicate content are the "duplicate" pages.
2. Make sure that all the important information from the "duplicate" pages is added to the "primary" page and saved.
3. Edit each "duplicate" page.
   1. Remove the page body.
   2. Add a short sentence linking to the "primary" page, with text something like "This page was a duplicate of ________ and will be removed/redirected soon." (putting in the URL of the master page in the ____ area). Save changes.
4. File a Documentation project issue. Title it "Obsolete pages to be redirected", and in the body, provide the URLs of pages to be deleted and the master page to redirect them to.
5. A docs administrator will take care of the redirect request issue.