Help:Archiving a talk page

On Wikipedia, talk pages are archived when they get too long. This is because it takes a lot of time to find new discussions on long talk pages. Only talk pages are archived. Articles are not. There are two ways to archive a talk page. Both ways are talked about below.

Users do not have to archive their user talk page when it gets long. The other option is to erase all the messages on the talk page. But this is not the best thing to do, as then it is hard for other people to find what they said to the user.

Using a subpage is the most popular method for archiving a talk page. There are two methods which can be used to make a subpage: Copy and paste, and move. Users can use any method they prefer, but should not mix the methods in archiving a page, because it confuses the visitors.

Archive pages should be named as follows: Take the name of the talk page, and then either add /Archive to the end, followed by a space and the number of the archive. For example:

• The first archive from Talk:Example would be named Talk:Example/Archive 1.
• The 7th archive of User Talk:Another Example would be named User Talk:Another Example/Archive 7

Note that the word "Archive" has a capital A, there is a space before the number, and there are no leading zeros. So Talk:Example/Archive 07 is not a good address because it has a leading zero, but Talk:Example/Archive 7 would be.

Or alternatively, a descriptive name like /Place of birth debate may be used for archiving a particularly large discussion of a single specific topic.

Remember to use the correct namespace – the part before the colon (:). For articles, it should start with Talk:; when archiving users' own user talk page content, it should start with User talk:.

1. Open the talk page that contains content you wish to archive.
2. Decide whether the content you wish to move should go into an existing archive or into a new one. (Note that the only editing typically permitted on existing archives is to move more content to them; it is perfectly permissible for an archive to contain multiple discussions).
3. If wanting to add to an existing archive, then open that archive (in a separate web browser tab).
4. To create a brand new archive:
   1. Start by picking a name for it. If you're making an archive for a special topic, you may use a name indicating that topic, for example /Place of birth debate. Otherwise you will use a normal numbered name like Archive 1, in which case you should pick the next available number not already in use.
   2. Determine the web address for this new archive by taking the address of the talk page you wish to archive content from (e.g. https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Lightning), and adding a forward slash (/) to the end of it, followed by the archive name from the previous step. Example: https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Lightning/Archive_1.
   3. Load that address in a new web browser tab.
   4. The loaded page will state Wikipedia does not yet have a page with this name.
   5. Click on Create source.
   6. Put {{talkarchive}} into the edit box.
   7. Click on Publish page.
   8. Congratulations, you have now made a new (empty) archive!
5. Copy the content you wish to move (archive):
   1. Go back to the web browser tab with the talk page containing the content you wish to archive.
   2. Click on Change source.
   3. In the edit box, select (highlight) all of the text you want to archive, and then copy it. You can do this by right-clicking it and then clicking copy. Note that archived text should consist of at least one complete discussion, including its topic heading.
6. Paste the content into the archive.
   1. Go back to the web browser tab with the archive.
   2. Enter (or re-enter) editing mode by clicking on Change source.
   3. Paste the content into the edit box (after any existing content). You can do this by right-clicking in the edit box and the clicking paste.
   4. Save the archive by clicking on Publish changes.
7. Remove the original copy of the moved content.
   1. Go back to the talk page web browser tab.
   2. Delete the original content you copied to the archive.
   3. Save the change by clicking on Publish changes.
8. Congratulations, you just archived some content!

• Discussions can be archived by topic, rather than a time frame. This may be better on talk pages where some topics have a tendency to come up again and again, and it is convenient to have all past discussion on an issue in one place. Archiving by topic is usually less appropriate for personal user talk pages.
• Unlike the permanent link archiving method, the archive can be edited for clarity. For example, headers can be renamed to be more helpful, unsigned comments can be noted, off-topic comments can be moved to a more appropriate place, chit-chat can be removed, etc. (However, this kind of editing might be considered a mild form of refactoring.)
• The links used throughout the discussions stay indexed within Wikipedia. This may also be bad, as 'what links here' is often clogged with archives and user talk pages.
• Editors who have the article on their watch list will not have the archived talk page put on their watchlist, which happens when talk pages are archived by moving them.
• Unlike the move procedure^{[broken anchor]} it does not reset the history of the page.

• Unlike the permanent link archiving method, new users may accidentally reply to inactive discussions, and the page is open to vandalism.
• This method assumes good faith changes by the person making the archive. When that trust breaks down, without the edit history on the archive page, it can be very complicated to prove that the archive is a genuine copy of the information being archived from the current talk page [1].
• Unlike the move procedure^{[broken anchor]} archives are not automatically added to the watchlists of the editors already watching the main discussion page.

Subpage archives can also be made by moving the entire talk page to a subpage.

Steps:

1. Start by performing a normal page move.
2. Edit the new archive page, inserting {{talkarchive}} at the beginning of its contents, and publish this change.
3. Remove the redirect of the talk page address to the new archive (produced by the move operation).

Advantages to this method are that change history linked to discussions is moved along with the discussions themselves, and there is no question of whether the archived content is a true identical copy to the original. A disadvantage is that this method is only viable if all discussions are old and archivable, unless you copy/move those that are not back to the talk page afterwards, though this then looses any change history associated with them and raises the question of whether or not they are truly identical copies of the originals (impossible for readers to know without spending time doing a comparison).

With this method, instead of copying discussions to a different page, you simply have a link to an earlier version of the page. These pages do not show up in search engines, as they are dynamically generated.

1. Go to the talk page you wish to archive and click on permanent link in the toolbox section of the left sidebar or go to the page history of the talk page and select the revision you want to use.
2. Copy the complete URL from the navigation bar of your web browser.
3. Edit the talk page and delete the text you want to archive. While you're still in the edit window, make a link to the URL you copied at the top. Keep in mind that syntax for full URL links is different than for Wikilinks. Here is an example: [http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Talk:A&oldid=1709131 Archive 1]: June 2004 – May 2005
4. Save. You have now archived a talk page.

You can make the link shorter, and hence keep the wikitext of the page more readable, by replacing the path to the page with a {{fullurl}} link, leaving the "oldid" section at the end. For example, the link given above could be replaced by this:

[{{fullurl:{{FULLPAGENAME}}|oldid=1709131}} Archive 1]

which would display as Archive 1. If you wish, you can also stop the "Other website" icon from showing up (since this is not a link to another website anyway) by surrounding the link with <span> tags like this:

<span class="plainlinks">[{{fullurl:{{FULLPAGENAME}}|oldid=1709131}} Archive 1]</span>

which shows as Archive 1.

• It is simpler and does not need as many resources.
• There is some guarantee that the discussions have not been altered mistakenly or by vandals.
• This strategy can be particularly useful for summarising discussions; you provide a brief overview of the many points of view and a link to the complete, clean discussion.
• Unlike the move procedure it does not reset the history of the page.

• Searching for past discussions is not possible, as the discussions archived by this method do not show up in search engines or Wikipedia search.
• You cannot organize topics into one place, although you can list links to sections within the page history that are appropriate to a particular topic.
• Archives cannot be easily recombined as with the subpage method. If you later wished to divide up the archives differently, you would need to paste all past archives to the talk page, save, and then re-archive (note that when this is done, the revision history becomes muddied).
• An edit of the archive by mistake (and ignoring the warning) would overwrite the current talk page.
• It is the least common of the two methods and may cause confusion even for experienced editors who are not familiar with "permanent link" function in the toolbox.
• It does not show up in Special:WhatLinksHere/page_title of the linked pages.

• {{Archive}}, for archiving non-talk pages
• Wikipedia:Talk pages