Help:Archiving a talk page

"Help:Archive" and "Help:Archiving" redirect here. For help on archiving web pages, see Help:Archiving a source. For the template used to mark discussions as closed, see Template:Archive top. For Wikipedia's historical archive, see Wikipedia:Historical archive.

For plain and simple automated archiving of talk pages, see Help:Archiving (plain and simple).

It is customary to periodically archive old discussions on a talk page when that page becomes too large. Bulky talk pages may be hard to navigate, contain obsolete discussion, or become a burden for users with slow Internet connections or computers. Notices are placed at the beginning of the talk page to inform all editors of an archive.

Regular articles are not archived because previous versions may be seen in the page history; the practice of archiving is unique to talk pages and noticeboards, which often swell to great length.

Archiving one's own user talk page is optional; some users simply blank the page, as the history is kept available for future reference, but this is not considered the best practice (as it makes things more difficult to find and link). Removal of content from your user talk page, such as warnings posted by others, is considered evidence you have seen the content; this is true whether the removal was manual or automatic.

The talk page guidelines suggest archiving when the talk page exceeds 75 KB (or 75,000 bytes), or has multiple resolved or stale discussions. However, when to archive, and what may be the optimal length for a talk page, are subjective decisions that should be adapted to each case. For example, ongoing discussions and nearby sections they reference should generally be kept intact.

There may be circumstances where it would be useful to keep older discussions present on a talk page, to avoid the same issues being repeatedly raised. However, this situation can be better addressed by use of the {{FAQ}} template.

Technical overview

The preferred method for archiving a talk page is to copy the older sections to a series of subpages, and remove the sections from the original page. This can be performed either by hand or automatically by a bot.

There are two common methods of naming archive pages. The most common, and easiest, is sequentially numbered archives. Archive pages should be named as follows: take the name of the talk page, and add "/Archive #", where "#" is the number of the archive. Note that the word Archive has a capital A, there is a space before the number, and there are no leading zeros. Templates like {{Archive list}} rely on this naming convention to automatically find the archive pages.

For example:

• The 20th archive of Talk:Earth would be named Talk:Earth/Archive 20
• The first archive of User talk:Example would be named User talk:Example/Archive 1

The second common method of naming archive pages is by year and month. With this method archive pages are typically named Talk:YourPage/Archives/2013/June, Talk:YourPage/Archives/2013/July, etc. Some things are more complex with this method of naming. When using this naming scheme the subpages should use /Archives/ not /Archive/ as some of the navigation templates rely on Archives being plural.

Remember to use the correct namespace – the part before the colon (:) – when archiving your own user talk page. It should start with "User talk:", not "Talk:".

Are there any existing archived talk pages?

Most of the methods here rely on checking if any archived talk pages already exist, and placing the new sections to be archived either into the most recent archive, or in a new archive numerically sequenced one above the existing archive. There is a search to check if any subpages exist under a talk page (and archived pages are usually placed in subpages of the existing talk page). In the search bar type:

Special:PrefixIndex/Talk:Pagename

For example

Special:PrefixIndex/Help talk:Archiving a talk page will display the talk page to this help page and all its archives.

Manual archiving

Cut and paste procedure

1. Edit the talk page, copying material you wish to archive to your computer's clipboard.
2. Create a new archive page at Talk:Example page/Archive N, where N is the lowest number for which no archive exists. (You can create the page by searching for the desired title and clicking the red link in the search results, or by editing the URL bar to point to the desired location then clicking the "Create" button.)
   • Alternatively, you may occasionally wish to create a topical archive, in which case the archive should be named according to the topic. For example Talk:Example page/Place of birth debate.
3. Paste the clipboard contents into this archive and add {{Talk archive}} (or {{Automatic archive navigator}} to enable navigation between archives) to the top of the code. Publish the new archive.
4. Delete copied material from main talk page with edit summary mentioning the name of the new archive.
5. If an archive box doesn't already exist on the main talk page, add the line {{Archives}} below the WikiProject tags and publish. (This will not be necessary if the main talk page already contains the line {{Talk header}}, since this template automatically contains a list of archives if they are named in the standard way.)
6. If there is already an archive box on the relevant talk page, you may want to add to it the link to the new archive.

For a more detailed set of instructions, see /Manual archiving.

Semi-automated cut and paste procedure

OneClickArchiver and Archy McArchface are userscripts designed to simplify the above manual procedure. Instead of manually copying and pasting the text, these scripts allow you to simply check which sections you wish to archive and specify a page to archive the selected sections to. Factotum is not a dedicated archiver script but can move a section to another specified page, which can be a talk page archive.

Other manual procedures

Other manual procedures were once considered equal alternatives with the cut and paste procedure described above. Over time both methods fell out of use and are generally not used. If you have used the page move procedure those pages do not qualify for speedy deletion by user request.

Templates

For archive pages

A template should be placed at the top of each archive page indicating that it is an archive. The simplest such template is {{Talk archive}}. If the page is using sequentially numbered archives, you can instead use {{Automatic archive navigator}} which will add navigation links to earlier and later archives (example).

ClueBot III and Lowercase sigmabot III will automatically place {{Talk archive}} on archive pages they create. They can be configured to use other templates using the header and archiveheader parameters, respectively. For example (for ClueBot III), |header={{Automatic archive navigator}}.

For talk pages

There are many templates that can be placed on talk pages to make the page's archives visible and accessible to editors. These can be broadly divided into "boxes" (which generally appear floating to the right of the table of contents), and banners. Some pages use one or the other, and some use both. Templates dedicated to archiving should generally be placed last, after all other talk templates, but before the discussions proper.

Archive link boxes

On regularly archived talk pages, it is useful to have an "archive box" template. Common usage is to place the archive box below other header templates and before the first section heading so that the box appears to the right of the table of contents. If the page already has a manual archive box, add the link to the new archive page to it. If there is no archive box yet, you may want to set one up.

The most common archive box template is {{Archives}}. It has a significant number of options. The auto option causes the box to automatically find your archive page list. If auto=yes or auto=short the links are shown as "1, 2, 3". If auto=long the links are shown as "Archive 1, Archive 2, Archive 3"). If the archives do not follow the standard naming scheme (/Archive #), or date labels are desired a manual list can be inputted in the first unnamed parameter as seen in example 2 below. There are also options which show a search field, permit the box to collapse/expand, start the box collapsed/expanded, etc. Many of these are shown in example 4 and all of them are explained in more detail at Template:Archive/doc.

Example 1

For a box with an automatically generated archive list with a search bar. {{Archives}} can be used without any extra parameters.

Example 2

For a box with a manual archive list and a search bar {{Archives|List of archives}} can be used. For the box to the right the code is:

{{tlp|Archives|
*[[Help_talk:Archiving_a_talk_page/Archive_1|2003–2006]]
*[[Help_talk:Archiving_a_talk_page/Archive_2|2006–2007]]
*[[Help_talk:Archiving_a_talk_page/Archive_3|2007–2009]]
*[[Help_talk:Archiving_a_talk_page/Archive_4|2008–2014]]
*[[Help_talk:Archiving_a_talk_page/Archive_5|2014–2019]]}}

Example 3

For a box with both an automatic and manual list {{Archives|List of archives}} can be used. The example below for Template talk:Archives where the archives for the old {{archive box}} template are shown use the following code: {{Archives|auto=long|'''Archive box archives''':<br>[[Template talk:Archive box/Archive 1|Archive 1]], [[Template talk:Archive box/Archive 1|Archive 1]]}}

Archive searching

If there are several archives, it is easy to search them all at once using the optional search parameter prefix. For example, suppose we want to begin a discussion about adding a security section to the Linux article. Before bringing up the topic we can do the following search: security prefix:Talk:Linux/. This will look in all the subpages of the Linux article in its Talk namespace.

The templates {{Archives}}, {{Archive box}}, and {{Talk header}} have a parameter search=yes which provides a helpful search box on the talk page to automate searching, as do independent search templates such as {{search archives}}. It is recommended that when a page is archived, such a template be put on the surviving talk page to simplify access to past discussions.

Continuing discussions

If a thread has been archived prematurely, such as when it is still relevant to current work or was not concluded, unarchive it by copying it back to the talk page from the archive, and deleting it from the archive. Do not unarchive a thread that was effectively closed; instead, start a new discussion and link to the archived prior discussion.