Tardis:Archiving policy

Our archiving policy outlines the conditions under which discussions on talk and forum pages may be archived. It hopes to define procedure for organising pages that have become too large and difficult to navigate. Archiving, rather than just deleting, comments is done for two reasons; to preserve discussions for future reference and to prevent out of date information clouding current event discussions.

Article talk pages
An article talk page should be archived when it exceeds 10 topics of discussion or has exceeded 50KB (50,000 bytes).

This must only be done when the primarily active discussions have been resolved or gone cold. In the case of the latter a cold discussion is 2 months following the the last post to the subsection. Archiving as a means of "sweeping under the rug" a contentious discussion is strictly forbidden.

Archiving of article talk pages can only be done by an admin, who are the final arbiters of when a discussion has concluded. Admin who archive particularly contentious discussions should leave a note behind which "closes" that discussion by giving their impression of the consensus arising from it.

User talk archiving
As explained in our vandalism policy, users may not simply remove comments from their own page except through archiving to a page which is then linked on the current revision of their talk page. The easiest way of creating such an archive is by pulling down the menu at the "edit" button on the top of the page. There, you will find an option called "archive". Follow the instructions and you'll have a neat archive completed in seconds.

Of course, you are under no obligation to archive your talk page, at all. It can run to hundreds of sections, if you'd prefer. But if you do choose to reduce the number of comments on your page, you must archive it, and place a link to that archive on the current revision of your talk page.

Forums
Forums are regularly archived, generally 2 months after the last major edit, major edits are defined as signed edits (and exclude maintenance edits).

Discussions that have been started and then been resolved with a definite close may be archived sooner than 2 months following the last edit.

Forum archives and information on how to archive the three parts of the forums can be found at their individual pages:
 * Forum:Panopticon archives
 * Forum:Reference desk archives
 * Howling:The Howling archives