Moving something keeps its author and its dates

Moving a page — from the node menu or with the move command — used to record it as if it had just been written from scratch by whoever did the move. The creator, the creation date, the last-edited date and the last editor were all replaced with "you, just now", and not only on the item you moved: everything underneath it was rewritten the same way. One tidy-up of a client folder was enough to make eighty documents, a commercial proposal among them, look like they had been authored that minute by the person reorganising them. Nothing could recover the real values afterwards.

A move changes where something lives. It does not change who wrote it, and it is not an edit, so all four stamps now travel with the item and with everything under it. The path and the namespace change — that is the point of a move — and nothing else does.

Copying is deliberately different, and now says so consistently: a copy is a new item, so it is recorded as created by you, at the moment you copied it, while the original keeps its own history untouched.