Merging procedure This is going to take a while to accomplish I suggest we come up with some type of rough outline to follow Can an administrator clarify what is being merged Just the Oxfordian articles listed at the top All the authorship articles Baconian Marlovian Oxfordian etc All of these into the Authorship article Both Oxfordian articles into one So many options were listed in the discussion that I am not sure what has been decided An administrator needs to clarify this before we can move forward Once we get clarification I also think it s been made clear that primary anti Stratfordian texts can not be used or at least that s my understanding This will take a bit longer to set up than just rushing in there with a machete not that I think anybody is advising such Meanwhile I ve got one short project left to finish before I can answer your charges against me so look for my answers sometime tomorrow I ll probably also answer them in stages since there are so many of them Start with a summary style main article written in Talk Shakespeare authorship question sandbox All editors should work to provide a full and detailed accounting of the controversy keeping in mind WP NPOV WP V WP RS and WP FRINGE After the article is written then replace this article and redirect all the other articles unless a clear rationale for a content fork or spinout article is shown to exist while creating that article As for primary source documents please keep in mind WP PSTS It is not at all clear that primary anti Stratfordian texts can not be used WP PSTS asserts that primary sources may be used but only with care And that caveat does not merely apply to anti Stratfordian texts it applies to all primary sources Stratfordian or otherwise Using primary source anti Stratfordian references with care is appropriate Please try to find external independent secondary and tertiary sources to keep the article as neutral as possible It appears we have an issue with the decision to merge I opened up a discussion with Wiki founder Jimbo Wales who advised this For what it is worth I misread the close What I meant is that there seems to be a consensus against undertaking a merge I see that the close says the opposite perhaps Peter just mistyped It happens Jimbo Wales talk I will check with Peter to see if he agrees otherwise we will need to followup on this discrepancy The close I wrote above makes it clear that merging is preferred following the Wikipedia Content fork guidelines Developing the article in Talk Shakespeare authorship question sandbox is preferred to continuing forum shopping Thanks My understanding is that the decision was based on the conclusion that the arguments for consolidating articles on alternative authorship hypotheses are stronger than those arguments for keeping them separate not a straight majority vote It appears that consensus majority when Smatprt wins the raw vote but I bet I can find at least five instances in the past two months where I was told that consensus majority when the majority was against him To clarify this is not to say that at the end of the day there will be only one article This is only to say that we should proceed from the ideals of Wikipedia Summary style and move forward The sandbox is open and I encourage people to begin to write The best arguments on the side of those opposing the merge are those who say that we may run into WP WEIGHT issues with extreme minority authorship opinions getting full paragraphs that compare in size to say the Oxfordians Well that s what the sandbox is for to get the weighting right before going live It may be that some of the tiniest minorit