Help talk:Archiving a talk page/Archive 1

message: Maybe this should include something about alternative methods. I'm starting to wonder if archived talk pages are useful, particularly for pages with a large number of edits. For example, if you want to work on the creationism article, do you really want to read six whole archives on the matter first? Recently on the deletion policy page, I summarised the earlier discussion and just provided a link to the history of the page where the full text could be found. Would it make sense to add this as an alternative? Angela 21:11, 10 Nov 2003 (UTC)
replies: text: Ah, I see, that is also an option. I just took a look at both Wikipedia_talk:Deletion policy and Wikipedia:Deletion policy but I couldn't find where you did this. What should I look for? -- Viajero 23:53, 10 Nov 2003 (UTC)

text: Everything above "unsummarised discussion" on Wikipedia_talk:Deletion policy was the summary. dif. Basically, I cut 9000 words out, and just put a link at the top, under the list of previously archived pages to the history version. Angela 00:29, 11 Nov 2003 (UTC)
replies: text: Ah, now I see. Ok, if you had to generalize, what kind of Talk pages do you think should be treated this way and what kind the other way? -- Viajero 00:32, 11 Nov 2003 (UTC)

text: I think it depends partly on whether it's worth the effort summarising. Is the discussion still applicable? Do people need to read it? Will they want to? Is there any benefit to having a summary or can the previous discussion be ignored? Is there a benefit in being able to have a full textsearch of the page? In cases like the village pump, an archive is useful because people are often searching for the same thing again and again. If you just link to the history, you won't be able to find anything through the search engine, but for other pages this might not be necessary anyway. It might depend on how long the archives are likely to be. For the deletion policy, I felt there were too many archives already, but other talk pages won't have this issue (or at least not immediately). Angela 00:41, 11 Nov 2003 (UTC)

text: A method that I would like to see discussed is the idea of placing all archive pages under categorical headings or perhaps use the categorical headings in the article so authors can easily find comments on the place in the article they wish to edit. For instance the Hitler article has over 35 archives. I don't know if there is anyway this could ever become WP policy but a good idea to form. Since I am relatively new at this if any user could direct me to a better place to discuss this idea that would be very helpful. Thecolemanation 15:39, 9 June 2006 (UTC)

text: /archive1, /archive2, /archive3 or /2002, /2003, /2004. Content is placed in the archives according to when it was said. Martin 19:19, 12 Nov 2003 (UTC)
thread_title: Alternative methods

message: I followed the convention set by the first archive page of the article on Europe when creating the second archive page, and added a horizontal rule.  (I think this is one place where the use of the horizontal rule is a good idea.)  I saw that the result was good, and now suggest that this convention be included in the How to archive a talk page article.  The instructions could read as follows:
When creating a new archive page, add the following text to the beginning of the page, substituting (a) the dates the archive covers for yyyy-mm-dd, (b) the real title for Article_title, and (c) the sequence number of the next archive page to be created for XX:

DO NOT EDIT OR POST REPLIES TO THIS PAGE. THIS PAGE IS AN ARCHIVE.
This archive covers approximately the dates between yyyy-mm-dd and yyyy-mm-dd.
Post replies to the [[Talk:Article_title|main talk page]], copying
the section you are replying to if necessary.
Please add new archivals to [[Talk:Article_title/ArchiveXX]]. Thank you. ~~~~
----

Teemu Leisti 13:09, 19 Feb 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: Well, no one gave any comments, but I just went ahead and did it.  I also added instructions on how to create links to the second-level headings of the archived pages. Teemu Leisti 17:48, 20 Feb 2005 (UTC)
replies: text:  And I edited the "Sequential archiving" section a few more times, but now it's perfection itself. :)  Teemu Leisti 08:19, 21 Feb 2005 (UTC)
thread_title: suggestion for a recommended heading for archived pages

message: Is there a way of archiving the deleted or long-gone discussions? In the case of an article, there is an everlasting history to it, or at least, until you get to when the article was created. Readers can see the entire evolution of an article. But is this the same way with a talk page? Once things get deleted instead of archived, is there a "history" section for that talk page, so that people who are worthy of the task can archive the discussions that have happened since the beginning of the article?
In other words, if discussions in the talk page are erased instead of archived, is there any way a person can archive the discussions that have been deleted, up until the very beginning of that talk page? Is there a History to the talk page, so that nothing is truly "deleted"? This is assuming that articles have histories that go as far back as the beginning of the article, with no limit on how far back they go.
: No. Histories reflect previous versions of the files. If one wanted to restore all original content in an article with very many edits, he would have to cull them from each of the historic backups. It would be unfeasible for an individual to do it manually, but perhaps someone could code up a nice bot for such a thing. (Though it would be tricky because there would be many cases to cover.) -DanDanRevolution 05:39, 11 May 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Archiving the deleted 

message: Couldn't Wikiusers archive without creating a new page by copying and pasting a link to an outdated version? Por ejemplo. freestylefrappe 03:15, 21 October 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  Query 

message: When I have questions to an article, I first check the discussion pages and search for the word of interest by using my browser's text searching capabilities, as my question may already has been discussed. Unfortunatly, with archived talk pages, it becomes uncomfortable to look everything up, as you have to crawl through each archived page.
It would be great if MediaWiki allowed a "search within archive" function. --Abdull 11:27, 7 February 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Searching within archives 

message: Is this a policy or a guideline? The article doesn't exactly make it clear. Probably a guideline. Kilo-Lima|(talk) 15:31, 5 April 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: Policy?

message: I propose that we advocate, as guideline, that archiving talk pages chronologically should be done with permanent linking, rather than with subpages. Here are my reasons:
* It creates less clutter by leveraging Wikipedia's existing archiving system.
* It ensures that users cannot edit archived conversations without setting off a red flag.
* It creates a unified page history. There has been debate (above) as to whether this is a beneficial feature.
:*I believe it is not negative: if you are interested in edits made to one specific archive page, simply use the dates of modification to guide you. Choose edits only between the dates that are relevant to your desired archive. 
:*It also provides a positive in that an editor can relive the entire history of the talk page without flipping between subpages. If I want to see what happened to the New York City article around the dates of the attach of 9/11, and if it so happened that these were split into multiple archives, then I would have to go through each archive's history to see the conversation unfold. If the history is unified, this is not an issue.
Here are the current "Disadvantages" listed for permanent linking, along with my rebuttals:
* 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.
:* My proposal deals with chonological archiving only.
* 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).
:* One would very rarely wish to repartition or recombine a chronological archives. In addition, it wouldn't be any more difficult than what one would do using subpages: Copy all of the text from each archive to a large page. Save it. Then redistribute it as one would with subpages.
:* The revision history would be "muddied" only in that it would show that you've recombined the archives. This is not detrimental.
* An edit of the archive by mistake (and ignoring the warning) would overwrite the current talk page.
:* This would be a glaringly obvious issue (especially because the resulting page will likely carry a header that says it's an archive). It would need to be reverted, just like any edit to an archived subpage.
* Unlike the move procedure it does not reset the history of the page.
:* I've argued that reseting the history is not desirable.
* 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.
:* This can be quickly overcome.
--DanDanRevolution 07:27, 23 May 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: Let folks do what they like best. I used what you prefer on my talk page for the reasons you've stated, but creating links to all archived sections takes some time. -- Omniplex 09:51, 23 May 2006 (UTC)

text: An obvious disadvantage of permalinking that doesn't seem to be mentioned is the fact that actual archive pages are tracked by google and by WP's search, so they can be searched. There is no simple way to search page histories. Christopher Parham (talk) 10:18, 23 May 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: That's a pretty big omission, Christopher, thanks for bringing it up. That is (unfortunately for my argument) a significant disadvantage. I suppose your both right, they should remain equal alternatives. --DanDanRevolution 14:16, 23 May 2006 (UTC)

text: Doesn't this also prevent pages from being Googlable?  Pretty huge disadvantage if you ask me. — Omegatron 23:09, 25 May 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: Above I agreed that these pages are not Googlable, but now that I think about it, I believe that they are. Here's justification: Google crawls the web using any links it finds. If someone on an archive page links to a permanent link, then Google will find it. That's all we need. Note, a seach for a permanent archive would include inurl:oldid. In fact, there would be no difference to Google whether or not the archive was on a subpage, or on a permalink. All Google would see is a link to an archive. The rest is identical. --DanDanRevolution 01:13, 26 May 2006 (UTC)
replies: text:  I'm pretty sure dynamically-generated pages are blocked by robots.txt — Omegatron 02:02, 26 May 2006 (UTC)

text: Oldids are global and unique, the &title= bit is completely unnecessary. http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?oldid=34965818 will take you to an old copy of my user page, and even if you include the wrong page name (http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Fan_fiction&oldid=34965818) it still works correctly. GarrettTalk 01:44, 27 May 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  [[Permalink]] archiving is underrated 

message: This guideline should state that recent and open discussions should not be archived. -- Centrx 21:26, 7 June 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Mention not archive recent discussions 

message: Hi all. Recently I modified  and  to include a better categorization scheme, so every once in a while I've been adding archive header templates to archived pages. Typically this is just  and  (see Talk:Main Page/Archive 2, for example). Are there any problems with this? I may start doing this to a lot of pages, so I just wanted to see what others thought. Thanks! ~MDD4696 04:37, 12 June 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: It is more direct and understandable to say "Do not edit this page". That is what is meant, and it is implicit in "archive" that is contents should be preserved. -- Centrx 05:45, 12 June 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: Do you mean to say that you think the wording of  should be changed? Personally I think it's fine as it is. It's not that we don't want people to edit the pages (for maintenance such as I what I'm doing), but that we don't want their contents to be altered. However, a note along the lines of "Do not edit this page" would discourage those who don't know better from editing the pages... a good thing, I think. ~MDD4696 16:41, 12 June 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: How about: "Do not edit the contents of this page." It is direct and restricted to just the contents. Or "Do not post new comments to this page." —Centrx→talk 05:09, 18 June 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Archive header templates 

message: Some people have very large user talk pages because they dont archive (either they dont know or care). This makes communication with them difficult as not all of us have T1 links... Any ideas on the matter? --Cat out 14:33, 14 June 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: A kind note might prompt them to archive. There's , but personally that seems rude. Beyond that, I'm not sure there's anything you can do... it's the user's choice when to archive and if they want to be difficult, well... they'll be difficult. ~MDD4696 20:58, 14 June 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: Maybe, this should be a guideline of Wikipedia? Some of the user talk pages are so long that some users using dial-up connection speeds have to wait for about 5 to 10 minutes before the affected page is completely loaded up! --Siva1979Talk to me 03:22, 27 June 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: Talk archiving

message: It says that doing so will break all the links on the page. I can't understand why this would be? Moving pages doesn't normally have this effect. And if it means incoming links (though I dunno where you'd find many of those except signatures), well, it seems you'd want those going to your current page, not one of the archived sections, anyway. -Goldom (t) (Review) 04:45, 18 June 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: When you archive a page, it will break incoming links to specific discussions (e.g. a link to Talk:Archives#Discussion 1). This is unavoidable with any of the archival methods. ~MDD4696 14:30, 19 June 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Question on move archiving