User:Þjarkur/Help:Archiving a talk page

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 particular 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). For this specific case, the use of "permalinks" can provide an easy way to display an archived view of a talk page at a given moment, though there's no control on thread organization or presentation.

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 template.

Technical overview
The preferred method for archiving a talk page is to copy the older content to a series of subpages. 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 " ", 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
 * The first archive of User talk:Example would be named

The second common method of naming archive pages is by year and month. With this method archive pages are typically named,  , etc. Some things are more complex with this method of naming. When using this naming scheme the subpages should use  not   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 " ", not " ".

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 , 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.)
 * 3) *Alternatively, you may occasionally wish to create a topical archive, in which case the archive should be named according to the topic. For example.
 * 4) Paste the clipboard contents into this archive and add  to the top of the code. Publish the new archive.
 * 5) Delete copied material from main talk page with edit summary mentioning the name of the new archive.
 * 6) If an archive box doesn't already exist on the main talk page, add the line  below the WikiProject tags and publish. (This will not be necessary if the main talk page already contains the line, since this template automatically contains a list of archives).

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 script allows you to simply check which sections you wish to archive and specify a page to archive the selected sections to.

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.

Automated archiving
ClueBot III and lowercase sigmabot III can automatically create archives for any discussion page (one that has "talk" in the namespace), by moving sections to a subpage when the section has received no comments for a specified period of time. Both bots can archive sections into simple sequentially numbered archives (e.g.,  , ...), or archive according to date (e.g.  ,  , ...).

See the lowercase sigmabot III page and the ClueBot III page for detailed instructions on setting up these bots. Those pages explain each of the parameters used, such as,  , etc. The examples below are also available for use. All of the examples here are intended for you to be able to copy them while viewing this page and paste them into the edit box on your target page without requiring any modification to have a working configuration.

Note: Make sure to establish consensus before setting up lowercase sigmabot III or ClueBot III on a talk page other than your user talk page.

Choosing a bot. Table comparing the 2 main bots
ClueBot III and lowercase sigmabot III, the two bots in current use for automated archiving, are similar in their behaviour, but have some differences in terms of features they implement and limitations on their use:

Sequentially numbered archives
Example configurations to set up automatic archiving of an article talk page or user talk page (you can add one of the following near the top of the page):

In general, you should include (to provide a search box) along with the content of one the following columns (starting with {{|undefined and ending with }}|undefined).

Archives by year/month
The configuration template for lowercase sigmabot III is still named User:MiszaBot/config even though the original bots, MiszaBot I, MiszaBot II, and MiszaBot III, are no longer active.

The best age for threads to be archived will vary, depending on talk page activity. The purpose of archiving article talk pages should be to remove stale discussions, not to stifle discussion. Article talk page threads should not typically be archived in less than 30 days except for very busy talk pages.

The /  parameter determines how large each archive is allowed to grow before a new archive is started. Keeping this value larger than a typical talk page allows the archives to be browsed more easily, but increases page load times. Each individual archive should not be larger than 512kB, because this may cause accessibility problems for some devices. Because a large batch of threads can "overshoot" the  parameter, the parameter should always be set lower than the maximum acceptable archive size.

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  and   parameters, respectively. For example (for ClueBot III), header.

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.

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  option causes the box to automatically find your archive page list. If  or   the links are shown as " ". If  the links are shown as " "). 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 can be used. For the box to the right the code is:


 * Example 3

For a box with both an automatic and manual list 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:


 * Example 4

This template just demonstrate a lot of the parameters. Most of them are quite self explanatory.

Automatic archive boxes for year/month archives
Automatic archive boxes for Year/Month archives are a bit more complicated.

The above code produces the archive box to the above right. The example here has no month names which are links because there are no archive files for this page. You can, of course, delete the lines for the years you don't want.

The default for the Archives by months template is that archive page names are in the format, , etc. However, Archives by months allows you to specify various naming conventions for your archives. Archives can have an arbitrary prefix by using the  parameter (e.g.   instead of Archive s /). Months can be in four formats: A) the default uses January, February, March, etc.; B)  months are Jan, Feb, Mar, etc.; C)   months are 1, 2, 3, ... 12; D)   months are 01, 02, 03, ... 12.

If you are using ClueBot III, it has a couple of additional options for creating an archive box. These involve the use of either the  or the   parameters. See the ClueBot III page for more information.

Archive link banner
Instead of putting the archive links in a box that floats to the right or left, some prefer the links in a banner.

The archive links show up in a row at the bottom of the above banner. To see examples go to Special:WhatLinksHere/Template:talkheader.

Archive indexing
Having an archive index makes finding old discussions on a given topic easier, particularly in pages with many archives, or when the archives are of considerable size. An archive index, when one exists, is typically stored on the page. While it is possible to generate an index by hand, the  page is normally generated automatically. There are two bots which automatically create indexes: Legobot and ClueBot III.

Legobot, formerly HBC Archive Indexerbot, can create an archive index page based on a set of archives. See the bot's instructions for details on how to set up archive indexing. Legobot generated archive indexes are the most commonly available type of index. To set up Legobot archiving you have to create your   page and need to place:

on top of the index page. The following is a Legobot configuration that works with numbered archives which you can place on the page you are archiving:

ClueBot III automatically creates an archive index when archiving. ClueBot III stores the archive indexes it creates on unique pages in its user space. The archive index for the page you are archiving can be transcluded onto your  page by putting the following text in that page:

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:. 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  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
It is difficult to say exactly when a discussion "ends" and when it is continuing. Given that archived discussions are immutable, archiving a discussion effectively ends that particular discussion. When reopening a discussion is desired, links to archived discussions can be provided in the new discussion thread.

Example pages
Here are actual discussion pages on Wikipedia where you can study the code to see how archive pages were created.
 * Talk:Psychokinesis has a simple archive box with a search field.
 * Talk:Jesus has a mixture of numbered and topical archives. It also includes a summary of recently archived discussions.
 * Talk:Main Page has many numbered archives. The archives are listed on a separate subpage and transcluded.