UESPWiki talk:Archive

Related Discussions
Archiving System UESPWiki talk:Community Portal/Archives

Revive/Update

This page was initiated by Ratwar's New Archiving proposal. Although the ideas were (in my opinion) good ones, the implementation has lapsed... probably in part because we all left it as Ratwar's sole responsibility to put it in place. I'd like to try to revive the proposal, with a few updates.

I think for the system to work long-term, it needs to be as easy as possible for many editors to help maintain the system.

• The specific tasks that need to be done have to be spelled out so anyone can complete them (see new sections here and here
• Decisions (in particular, a discussion's categories) need to be easier to make, and done as a separate step from actually archiving the page (so that anyone can help with the archiving, and archiving doesn't get delayed by the categorization step).
• Encourage various stages of the archiving to be done as needed, instead of making it seem that archiving is an all-or-none process.
• A Task List item can be added to recruit editors to help, in particular with the backlog of uncategorized archives.
• The system also has to be more visible so that editors know it exists. I've added some links to the archive categories, and I'll be working on getting more added where appropriate.

The primary change that I've implemented is a new template, Archive Header, to be used on all archived subpages. This header:

• Takes care of all the categories (or if no categories have been specified, puts the page into an uncategorized list flagging that categories need to be done)
• Keeps track of the archived subpage's original source, so it can be used for archiving pages other than just the Community Portal (if there are individual topics on other pages that should be archived onto separate pages with categories, etc.)
• Can be added to a topic before it is archived, so that the categories can be identified before the topic is ready for archiving, for example when the topic is first created. If used on the original page, the template will be invisible; move it to the archive subpage, and it appears. Examples have been filled in for several entries on the current Community Portal (edit the page and search for Archive Header).

Another tweak is to the archive categories. I think that the archive categories should in large part reflect the articles in the UESPWiki namespace. In other words, for nearly every article UESPWiki:Page_X there should be a category Category:Archive-Page_X. Then there is a clearly-identified place to look for additional discussion relevant to a given policy; a link to that category can be added on the UESPWiki talk page (see for example the link box at the top of this page). Another advantage is that fewer new names need to be invented for the archive categories. (Although there will still need to be additional categories to cover topics that don't have UESPWiki articles).

Finally (for now!) I replaced the CP Archive pages (Community Portal/Archive_1-Community Portal/Archive_7) with transcluded versions of the pages. Having two copies of the archived content was redundant and was leading to maintenance issues (e.g., were updates such as link fixes being made to both versions of the page? There were already differences between what had been done to the two versions of the same page, which would only get worse with time).

I'll be adding a task list entry and working on setting up more examples of various details of the implementation. In the meantime, let me know if there's any feedback :) --Nephele^Talk 19:43, 21 June 2008 (EDT)

Merge/Redirect

It seems to me that this is just an out-of-date version of UESPWiki:Archiving Guideline, and I can't really see how it's serving a separate purpose. I think any useful information that's not on the Archiving Guideline ought to be moved there (as the Guideline page has actually been treated more like a policy page and has been maintained better, and then this page can be turned into a redirect. Thoughts? ⇠eshe^talk 14:46, 25 October 2012 (GMT)

I don't see any problem with this. — ABCface^◥ 16:44, 25 October 2012 (GMT)