Alex' Gardenアレックスの庭

3 min read

consolidate

Merge near-duplicate or heavily-overlapping pages. Ported from vanillaflava’s wiki-integrate. Propose-first, act-only-on-approval — the graph is load-bearing and silent merges corrupt it.

When to use

  • User runs /consolidate.
  • User points at specific pages: “merge A and B”.
  • reconcile report surfaced merge candidates and user wants to action them.

Workflow

1. Identify candidates

If given specific pages, skip to step 2.

Otherwise, scan for:

  • Pages with near-identical titles (edit distance ≤3, case-insensitive).
  • Pages with ≥60% body overlap (crude: shared tokens, shared wikilinks, shared headings).
  • Pages where one is a clear superset of the other.

Limit to ~5 candidate pairs per run. More than that means a bigger cleanup session is needed.

2. Propose — do NOT merge yet

For each candidate pair, produce a proposal:

### Proposal: [[Page A]] + [[Page B]]
 
**Recommendation:** Keep [[Page A]] as target, merge [[Page B]] into it.
 
**Reason:** <why A is the better target — more inbound links, more complete body, newer, clearer title, etc.>
 
**Content deltas:**
- Sections unique to B that should land in A: <list>
- Conflicting claims (need human resolution): <list>
 
**Link migration:** N pages currently wikilink to [[Page B]] — would be retargeted to [[Page A]].
 
**Changes if approved:**
- Append B's unique sections to A.
- Add B's tags to A (deduplicated).
- Redirect all inbound wikilinks from [[Page B]] to [[Page A]].
- Delete B, OR turn B into a redirect stub with `aliases: [Page B]` on A.

Present all proposals to the user. Wait for explicit approval per pair before acting.

3. Apply (only on approval)

Per approved pair:

  1. Merge unique content from source into target, preserving order and context.

  2. Deduplicate tags.

  3. grep -rl '\[\[Page B\]\]' across vault, rewrite each occurrence to [[Page A]] (or [[Page A|Page B]] if the original display text mattered).

  4. Add Page B to aliases: in target’s frontmatter.

  5. Delete source file.

  6. Append to log:

    ## [YYYY-MM-DD] consolidate | [[Page A]] ← [[Page B]]
- Links retargeted: N
- Conflicts resolved: <list>

Rules

  • Never silent-merge. Always propose; always wait.
  • Target = more connected, more complete, newer — in that order of priority.
  • Preserve aliases. The merged title becomes an alias on the target so old links keep working.
  • Don’t merge across _Canon/ boundary. If one page is canon and the other isn’t, the non-canon page gets absorbed if the canon page genuinely covers its content; otherwise leave them separate.
  • One-way. A + B → A (not a new page). Picking a survivor matters.
  • Per-pair approval. Don’t batch-approve.

Blocked cases

  • Conflicting facts between pages → surface in proposal, user resolves before approval.
  • Both pages are canon → do not propose. Log as a structural issue for next reconcile.
  • Source page has many unique inbound links from very different topics → probably not a duplicate. Reconsider.

Verification

  • After approved merges, grep -r '\[\[Page B\]\]' returns empty (or only aliases: frontmatter).
  • log has the entry.
  • git diff shows the merge, link rewrites, and deletion.

Graph View