Help:Archiving a talk page

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This article explains the steps to be followed for talk pages that have accumulated large amounts of closed discussions.

What discussions should not be archived?

Open discussions should not be archived.

Archiving discussions on user talk pages is uncommon. Instead, users may delete discussions from their own talk pages.

Procedure

Linking to the archive subpage

Add {{Archived discussions at}} below {{Talk page}} if it's not already present:

{{Talk page}}
{{Archived discussions at}}

== Example discussion 1 ==

The preview should show the following element:

Note
Some closed discussions have been moved to an archive subpage: Help talk:Archiving a talk page/Archive.

Moving discussions to the archive subpage

Select closed discussions, i.e. discussions that contain {{Talk|done}} or {{Talk|closed}}. Cut these discussions and paste them on the page linked to in the previously created note.

Existing archived discussions should not be removed. Instead, ensure that all archived discussions remain in the order that they were created. The date of a discussion's creation can be found in the first signature.

For example, the following discussion was created on August 26th, 1991:

== More spiders information needed ==

This page has a lot of detail about the web, but I really dont understand a single word of it, and it doesn't mention the spider once -- [[User:Example|Bob Smith]] 18:07, 26 August 1991 (UTC)
: No no. This page is talking about the "world wide web". I have added a clarification at the top - [[User:Example|Simon Brown]] 11:21, 28 August 1991(UTC)

Linking from the archive subpage to the talk page

Add {{Archived discussions from}} to the top of the archive subpage if it's not already present:

{{Archived discussions from}}

== Example discussion 1 ==

The preview should show the following two elements:

Note
The following sections are completed discussions previously found on the Help talk:Archiving a talk page page. They have been moved here for archival purposes.

Important note to editors

When moving discussions here, try to keep these discussions in chronological order. The date of a discussion's creation can usually be found in the first signature.

Writing the edit summaries

Before saving the changes to the archived subpage, link to the talk page from the edit summary:

Move discussions from [[Help talk:Archiving a talk page]]

The inverse should be done in the talk page's edit summary:

Move discussions to [[Help talk:Archiving a talk page/Archive]]