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The net effect is that you deleted a bunch of content, plus which there is more to say about each individual rate (construction particulars for instance), plus it doesn't work with the categorization system. When thinking about merging articles, one important thing to consider is whether the article is small because it's new and needs more content, or it will always be small. In the case of the RN rates, all have much to say about them - rationale, evolution, employment, plus a picture or two so we can see what they looked like. This article should be about the system as a whole (who introduced it and why? When did it go out of use? How did it compare to other nations' systems?) - once you have adequate treatment of all that, plus the two screenfuls with two representative pictures per rate, that's a pretty hefty article, no longer easy for reader to get the basic definition of ""third-rate"". When considering organization like this, it's worthwhile to look at history of all the articles concerned, and maybe query the editors who set it up, because what you've effectively done is to destroy article structure that I and others carefully set up some time ago. Talk pages are mostly used for debate, so lack of talk page bits combined with multiple editors in history indicates that all the editors agreed perfectly, no need to discuss.  08:01, 14 Sep 2004 (UTC)"