Help talk:Archiving a talk page

Dearchiving/unarchiving

Is there a guideline on taking a archived topic out of an archive and restarting it ? (Rather than restart it in the talk page from scratch again). I ask this because I have come across a number of times where talk pages have been archived, generally in one of two ways, when IMO they should not have been.

They are either archived a) simply on age [not length], where just because discussions are maybe years (or sometime just months old), they have been archived. A talk page may only have 3 or 4 short topics, and someone has archived it solely the age of the discussion (or date of last reply), and not whether the talk page needed it because of length. I find this both unnecessary and stiffling to further discussions. So what if the last reply could be years old ? On low visited pages, some topics may rarely be looked at. In addition, new evidence or discoveries may have occured, leading to re-interest or queries in a long dormant discussions.

b) some talk pages are archived by archive bots whose 'date to archive' threshold is so low as to either accidentally or (in somecases) purposely block further discussion on a topic. I've seen as low a 10 days on subjects that are not highly visited, and where the low threshold cannot be justified.

The problem is that once something is archived, unless is is restarted from scratch, you can't further discuss it. With a bot, even restarting may mean in a few days times its back in the archives (yeah, I could change the bot's settings, but some editors just change them back).

So what stance is taken on these two specific cases ? Can editors unarchive a discussion where it would be to the betterment of the article ? The Yeti (talk) 14:57, 9 January 2011 (UTC)

See also similar issue raised by another user below "Archiving loses record of errors" The Yeti (talk) 23:00, 8 June 2011 (UTC)

Archiving loses record of errors

I don't know if this is the place to mention it, or if anyone even cares, but I've come across a number of instances where a mistake is pointed out on an article's talk page, but after a while the post gets shuffled off to an archive page where it is effectively lost forever, even though the problem was never fixed. I guess the message is: just because there has been no activity on a post in a while does not mean it is not still relevant. 86.160.217.252 (talk) 03:14, 4 June 2011 (UTC)

It isn't lost forever, it's just been put into a different page. But I suppose a good solution would be to keep any unfinished or uncommented or unresolved (however you want to put it) sections on the main talk page and wait for them to be concluded before archiving. That Ole' Cheesy Dude (Talk to the hand!) 17:39, 6 June 2011 (UTC)

This is similar to the problem I highlighted above "Deachiving/unarchiving". Obviously not archiving the issue in the first place would be the solution ; but then, if that was happening there would be no need for someone to point out that that ain't working ! (The issue partly occurs because of bots autoarchiving stuff.) Is dearchiving allowed ? The Yeti (talk) 23:00, 8 June 2011 (UTC)

I've just looked into Archive 4 for this talk page. Ironically, this issue (or similar) has been raised at least three times there (1, 2, 3), and not been really resolved ; & so should not be archived ; but now they are, & you can't add to the discussion ; and you can't dearchive them either. I feel dizzy. The Yeti (talk) 23:16, 8 June 2011 (UTC)

Yes, of course I realise it is still retrievable on the archive page, but by "effectively lost forever" I mean it will in practice never be noticed by anyone coming along who might be in a position to fix it. One would hope that a human archiver might leave notices of unresolved mistakes in situ (though I'm not sure that's always the case), but I don't know how archive bots would be able to make that decision unless there was some "resolved/unresolved" flag that was consistently applied. IME bots just dumbly archive anything that has been inactive for more than x days, don't they? 86.160.222.19 (talk) —Preceding undated comment added 02:53, 12 June 2011 (UTC).

True, but that's one of the reasons why most pages aren't automatically archived. (The other being the lack of need on many pages, of course.) --Philosopher ^{Let us reason together.} 16:03, 10 October 2011 (UTC)

Can someone help me?

I tried to create my fourth Talk Page archive, and tried following the instructions on the Move Method on this help page, but all it says in the section on how to do it is "Subpage archives can also be created by moving the talk page to a subpage." I ended up screwing up the names of all four pages somehow, and even though I think I mostly fixed the problem, I can't seem to find the contents of Archive 1. Although this page is labeled Archive 1, you can see from the contents that they're not. Whereas the rightful contents of Archive 1 are dated March 17, 2005 - April 22, 2007, that page's contents are actually the contents of Archive 3, which are dated August 12, 2008 - December 26, 2009. Can someone help me figure this out? Nightscream (talk) 00:47, 22 March 2011 (UTC)

It looks like you've mixed together Cut and paste procedure and Move procedure. Archives 2 and 3 are cut-and-paste archives, while 1 and 4 are move archives. I'm not sure what happened at this move on 26 December 2009; my guess is that you moved your talk page over an existing archive, somehow histmerging them together. Reverting to this 22 April 2007 archive should fix Archive 1. Flatscan (talk) 05:09, 22 March 2011 (UTC)

How do I do that? Nightscream (talk) 06:56, 23 March 2011 (UTC)

It looks like you fixed it. Flatscan (talk) 05:18, 24 March 2011 (UTC)

Scunthorpe website

82.28.3.147 (talk) 19:15, 7 June 2011 (UTC)how can i get a link to my website that is about Scunthorpe,www.activscunthorpe.com

This link is probably not suitable for a Wikipedia article; please see the Wikipedia guideline on links to external websites, especially this section and this one. You will get a faster response to requests for help if you use the main Help desk; only a few helpers will be watching for questions on pages like this one. -- John of Reading (talk) 20:13, 7 June 2011 (UTC)

I need some help as well

Can someone take a look at my talk and help with my autoarchiving. It isn't working correctly and I am not sure what I can do to fix it. If someone could tell me how or be bold and take care of it I would be thankful.--Adam in MO Talk 05:08, 1 November 2011 (UTC)

Fixed with this edit, I hope. -- John of Reading (talk) 07:50, 1 November 2011 (UTC)

Missing archives

The archives for Talk:Jeff Stryker are missing. Could someone take a look into it? __meco (talk) 09:38, 3 January 2012 (UTC)

Y Done I hope. We'll find out when the bot next runs. -- John of Reading (talk) 10:03, 3 January 2012 (UTC)

Very good going. Appreciated! __meco (talk) 13:47, 3 January 2012 (UTC)

Relevance of WP:A-A

We currently have a link to User:Kslotte/Auto-archiving in the see also section. One user (Jayjg) has deleted the link with the comment "personal opinion, not generally followed"; I've restored it. Do you also think that the link is irrelevant to the topic on this page and should be deleted?--Oneiros (talk) 19:43, 12 February 2012 (UTC)

I've removed it again. It's just a personal essay, it's not even in Wikipedia space (just user space), and, aside from you, very few people actually follow it or give it any credence. Jayjg ^(talk) 00:42, 14 February 2012 (UTC)