UESPWiki:Archiving Guideline

This guideline describes when and how talk pages should be archived.

Talk pages (and general discussion pages such as Community Portal and Administrator Noticeboard) are intended to provide everybody in the UESP community with an opportunity to discuss issues.  In order to preserve the record of past discussions, content on talk pages should not generally be deleted.  However, active talk pages can become overly long: long pages are slow to download, difficult to navigate, and difficult to edit.  In these situations, it is recommended that old and inactive sections of the page be archived, by moving those sections to a subpage.

When to Archive
Archiving is appropriate under the following circumstances:
Archiving should only be considered when a talk page becomes long, generally at least 32 kb in length.
The only sections of the talk page that are eligible for archiving are those where the discussion has been inactive (meaning that there have been no new additions to the discussion) for at least one week (preferably longer).

Any UESP editor can archive a general talk page if it meets these requirements, although the task often ends up being done by Administrators, especially in the case of community talk pages such as the Community Portal. If you feel that a talk page needs to be archived, but do not feel comfortable doing it yourself, a request can be made on the Administrator Noticeboard.

User Talk
User talk pages should only be archived by that user.  The guidelines for archiving do not strictly apply to user talk pages, since each user's personal preferences will determine what the user wishes to do with their talk page. However, users may choose to adopt these guidelines for use on their talk pages. User talk page archives are not typically semi-protected.

Community Portal
On the Community Portal, there can be multiple lengthy-but-active discussions, making it necessary to create subpages devoted to active discussions.  While similar to archiving, in this case the subpages are devoted to active topics. The Community Portal is the only talk page on which it is appropriate to create subpages which contain active discussions; the process is described on that page.

Finding pages to archive
You can use the MediaWiki API to find a list of long pages. This URL will find a list of all pages over 35,000 characters in length in the namespace XXX:
:  

To find the number of the namespace you want to check, see this link:
:

For instance, to find a list of all long pages in the Skyrim_talk namespace,   must be replaced with  :
:

Note that all long pages are returned, including existing archives.

How to Archive
The procedure to archive sections of an article talk page is as follows:
# Create a subpage with the name "Archive," or when multiple archives exist or are anticipated, a name such as "Archive_1" or "Archive_Dec2006".  For example, if archiving the page Oblivion_talk:Mercantile, the archive page could be named Oblivion_talk:Mercantile/Archive.
# Move the inactive discussion(s) to the archive page.
# Add an   and   to the new archive page.
# Add an   to the original talk page.  This will create a table to neatly display all the archives for that particular page.
# Make a request on the Administrator Noticeboard asking for the page to be semi-protected.

Editing Archived Discussions
The purpose of archiving discussions is to make it easier to contribute to the active discussions on the talk pages; the intent is not to curtail any discussions or prevent any editors from contributing to older discussions.  Archived discussions should not be edited; if an editor wishes to resume an archived discussion, it is best to do so on the regular talk page.  If the archived discussion is short, move it back to the regular talk page, and add any new comments.  For longer discussions, it may be better to start a new discussion section on the regular talk page, but start the new section with a link to the archived discussion and perhaps a summary of what was said.

See Also
Wikipedia's guidelines on archiving