Meta:Standard archival system
 | The following page documents a Meta-Wiki guideline. It is a generally accepted standard that users should follow, though it should be treated with common sense and the occasional exception. When editing this page, please ensure that your revision reflects consensus. When in doubt, discuss on the talk page, Babel or at RfC. |
The standard archival system (consisting of a naming convention and two templates) is a method of organizing discussion archives for easy navigation, creation, and bot parsing.
Organization
Each set of archives ideally consists of two types of pages:
- one archive index, which lists archives and topics (this is optional);
- several archive pages, which contain the archived discussion.
Archive index
The optional archive index must be located at "<current talk page>/Archives". This index is a list of discussion topics by archive, generally in the following format. The list format can be freely changed to reflect local needs, such as subdivided lists (example) or removing the lists of topics.
{{archive-index}}
==Archives==
* [[/2007-07|July 2007]]: <small>''topic 1'' | ''topic 2'' (2 subtopics) | ''topic 3''.</small>
* [[/2008-01-01|01 January 2008]]: <small>''topic 1'' | ''topic 2'' | ''topic 3''.</small>
* [[/2007-01-15|15 January 2008]]: <small>''topic 1'' | ''topic 2'' | ''topic 3'' | ''topic 4''.</small>
Archive pages
If there is an archive index, each archive page should be at "<current talk page>/Archives/<date>". If there is no archive index, each archive page should be at "<current talk page>/<date>". The date format should be yyyy-mm-dd (one of: 2024, 2024-10, or 2024-10-24).
Each archive page should contain "{{archive header}}" at the top, which will detect the archival date from the page title, and link to current discussion and the archive index (if present).
The content is always archived to the last relevant archive page (i.e. the archive page which has the date of the period when you're archiving), regardless of the original date of addition of the content to the original page.
Quick instructions
- Create an archive page at "[[Page name/Archives]]" (for example, Meta:Requests for deletion/Archives) with the following code:{{archive-index}}
==Archives==
* - Add a link to the archive pages under "Archives". Archive pages should be named "<current talk page>/Archives/<date>". The date format should be yyyy-mm-dd (one of: 2024, 2024-10, or 2024-10-24). For example:* [[/2024-10|October 2024]]
- Save, and click the link to create the page. Copy and paste "
{{archive header}}" to the top of the page. - Save; the archive is now created. To add entries, simply cut and paste them from the main page to the archive.
- Optionally, list the discussions on the archive index (example). This can be quickly done by copy and pasting the table of contents to this page, and then copy and pasting
'' | ''between each heading name.
See also
- Templates