This is an essay. It contains the advice or opinions of one or more Wikipedia contributors. This page is not an encyclopedia article or a Wikipedia policy, as it has not been reviewed by the community.

Merging comes from a desire to improve a page or create a superior new one. It is the act of improving a page (target page) by copying content from another page (source page), following which that content is removed from the source page, to prevent inappropriate duplication—and—because whatever remains on the source page can no longer serve as an appropriate standalone page, the source page is converted into a redirect (rather than being deleted; it is not deleted to preserve attribution).

Merging does not, by definition, come from a desire to make a page stop being live, because turning a page into a redirect does not improve any other page; however, both desires can coincide. But even then, the most essential quality of merging is that of improvement and transformation towards a superior final state. If there is a written record that editors have decided to merge a page into another page, but their apparent desires are only to remove the source page from Wikipedia, then they have not concerned themselves with improving a page, and, as a result of that, nothing might get merged (no one cares to actually do it, or no one genuinely thought that the content would make the notional target page better), and the real outcome being obfuscated is mere redirection. The latter is known as a zero-byte merge, and that is a widely accepted and not an inappropriate practice—but it is a merge in name only.

Because merging is about improvement, and what is improved is not the page intended as the source, whenever a discussion about merging is started on a talk page, this talk page should always be the talk page of the target page.

Consequently, when a merge is discussed at a deletion forum rather than the target page's talk page, any formal outcome signified by the word "merge" splits into two material decisions—one immediate and the other one pending.

• A deletion discussion evaluates the source page against suitability standards to decide if it should exist or not; it is ill-equipped to determine what is best for the target page. Closing a deletion discussion with "merged" means the community agrees the source page should be redirected, while merely suggesting its content be added to the target, which might still be disputed.
• The responsibility for achieving consensus for inclusion is on editors seeking to include disputed content, and a deletion forum does not build the relevant consensus for that, as any deletion discussion is merely adjacent, not superordinate to any talk page, due to the fundamental difference in scope and purpose. Editors at the target page still decide whether to actually include the copied-over material, based in whether it (of how much of it) improves the page. If adding it becomes and remains disputed, the content is left out, and the action defaults to a simple redirect, possibly with a reverted insertion of the source page's contents into the target page's history.