Help:Archiving
Archiving a talk page cleans up and shortens an excessively long talk page and provides easily accessible references for past discussions. Any talk page on the Guild Wars 2 Wiki can be archived. This help article will explain when and how to archive, and also offer some tips on what to avoid.
When to archive[edit]
A talk page should be archived when it is generally too large or cluttered for comments to be easily added and read. It is recommended that you leave active discussions on the talk page and only archive the stale ones.
How do I archive a talk page?[edit]
There are two simple ways in which a talk page can be archived:
- Copy and paste all of the talk page source content that needs to be archived into a separate page.
or - Move the whole talk page to another name and replace the resulting redirect with a link to the archive(s).
The new archive page should be suitably named and in the correct namespace. For example, User talk:Example/Archive X (archive for User:Example's talk page) or Talk:Article/Archive X (archive for article named "Article"), where X can either be a numerical count or date.
If archiving frequently, it may help to put the month and date in the archived page title as this makes it easier when doing a search later.
See Help:Editing on how to create or move a page.
Archiving guidelines[edit]
- Archive talk pages by sections.
- Avoid performing discussions on archived talk pages.
- Comments should generally not be removed when archiving.
- Visibly link to any archived talk pages from the original talk page.
- Explain that you're archiving in the edit summary.
- An archived talk page is still considered a talk page.
Tips[edit]
- Use an {{Archive-box}} on a talk page to make the archive links more consistent and appealing.
- Use the {{archived}} template (or a similar notice) at the top of the archive to inform others that it is an archive and should not be edited.
