Wikipedia:How to archive a talk page

It is customary to periodically archive a Talk pages when it becomes too large. Bulky talk pages are difficult to navigate and usually contain obsolete discussion. Additionally, large talk pages are a burden for users with slow Internet connections, and some users may not be able to edit pages larger than 32 kB because of Browser page size limits.

There are two main methods for archiving a talk page, detailed below. Regardless of which method you choose, you should leave current, ongoing discussions on the existing talk page. It is also helpful to label your archives with dates and briefly summarize their main discussions.

Refactoring talk pages is an alternative to, or is complementary to, archiving it.

Subpage archive method

Using a Subpages is the most popular method for archiving a talk page. There are two alternative procedures which can be used to create a subpage: "Cut and paste" or "move".

The standard chronological subpage archive naming convention is Article/Archive #, where # is the number of the archive. Archive is capitalized, there is a space before the number, and there are no leading zeros. For example, the twentieth archive would be named Article/Archive 20.

Cut and paste procedure

Click on edit this page for the talk page you wish to archive.
In the edit box, highlight all the text you want to archive, right-click (Windows) or control-click (Mac), and then select cut. The text will then be copied to your clipboard.
While still in the edit window, make a link to the archive you plan on creating. Put a forward slash in front of the link to make it a subpage, e.g. Articlename/Archive 1 or Articlename/Place of birth debate. Here is some sample code: *Articlename/Archive 1: June 2004 – May 2005. In effect, you are replacing the old discussions with a link to the archive.
- You can also use to generate a floating box for the archive links.
Save the page. You should now have a mostly empty page with a red link to your archive at the top. Follow the red link, and click create an article with this title.
- If you've used the archivebox, it will show current dates as the red link. Later you can click on edit this page for your talk and change the dates or wording to suit the archive you've created.
Paste the old discussions from your clipboard into the edit box. Before saving, you will want to create a notice at the top explaining that the page is an archive of inactive discussion and should not be edited. The template is available. If other archives exist, you may also want to use to link to them so curious readers can easily navigate between archives. Sample usage (for "Archive 2"): .
Save. You have now created an archive.

Advantages of cut and paste

Discussions can be archived by topic, rather than chronologically. This may be appropriate on talk pages where certain topics have a tendency to come up again and again, and it is convenient to have all past discussion on an issue in one location. Archiving by topic is usually less appropriate for personal user talk pages.
The archive can be edited for clarity. For instance, headers can be renamed to be more helpful, unsigned comments can be noted, irrelevant 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 talk pages.)
The links used throughout the discussions remain indexed within Wikipedia. This may also be a disadvantage, as 'what links here' is often clogged with archives and user talk pages.

Disadvantages of cut and paste

New users may accidentally reply to inactive discussions, and the page is open to vandalism.
This method assumes good faith edits by the person creating 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 archive from the current talk page ^*.

Automated archival

Werdnabot can currently perform this type of archival on any discussion page (one that has "talk" in the namespace). Any sections older than a certain age in days are cut-and-pasted to a specified subpage. A tutorial on setting this up on a discussion page can be found Werdnabot/Archiver/Howto. In general, do not use this bot for article discussion pages.

Move procedure

Subpage archives can also be created by MOVE the talk page to a subpage.
Once the move has been made, to reduce the likelihood of an accidental edit to the archive, it is advisable to add a line to the top and bottom of the archived page stating that it is an archive. The template is available to save some typing and to give the message a consistent appearance.
Alter the redirect link on the now empty talk page into an ordinary link so that the Archive can be found by clicking on the link.
Copy discussions that are still active back to the original talk page.

The end result of the move is the same cut and paste procedure, except that the page history of the talk page is also moved to the subpage. This procedure is particularly suited to very busy talk pages where the page history can grow extremely long.

Archives

1 2

Here is a table which can be placed near the top of the talk page to hold the links to the archives pages as shown to the right of this text. It has the advantage that it will appear to the right of the Table of Contents as the new talk page page grows. You can cut and paste the lines below to create this effect.

{| class="infobox" width="150" |- How to archive a talk page

|- |align="center"|1 2 |}

Controversy

There is some controversy over which of these procedures is preferable. On one hand, if a page is archived by moving, someone looking for a specific past version of the page must first locate the correct archive, and all links to diffs on that talk page are now broken. On the other hand, with cut-and-paste archiving, someone looking for the history of a specific archived section must dig through the entire (possibly very long) history of the original page. Whichever way you prefer, you should generally stick to one procedure or the other on any given page, since mixing the two only causes confusion.

Permanent link archives method

With this method, instead of copying discussions to a separate page, you simply provide a link to an earlier version of the page. Caveat: it is not possible to link to an earlier version of a page with a Wikipedia-style link. You have to supply the full URL.

Procedure

Go to the talk page you wish to archive and click on permanent link in the toolbox section of the left sidebar. Alternatively, go to the page history of the talk page and select the revision you want to use.
Copy the complete URL from the navigation bar of your web browser.
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: Archive 1: June 2004 – May 2005
Save. You have now archived a talk page.

Purists will note that the URL can be radically trimmed:: ^*; Archive 1

Advantages of this method

It is simpler and requires fewer 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 succinct overview of the various points of view and a link to the complete, unadulterated discussion.

Disadvantages

You cannot organize topics into one place, although you can list links to sections within the page history that are relevant to a particular topic.
Archives cannot be easily repartitioned and recombined as with the subpage method. If you later wished to divide up the archives in a different way, you would need to paste all past archives to the talk page, save, and then rearchive (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.
Unlike the move procedure it does not reset the history of the 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 do not show up in special:whatlinkshere/page_title of the linked pages.

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