DIYWiki:Archiving pages
How to Archive pages
Why to archive pages
Talk pages such as Talk:Main Page get big and the notes and discussions on them get out of date. Archiving saves the content (for reference or in case of disputes) in a rather more formal way than the page's history does.
How to
This should be done by sysops only
There doesn't seem to be any tool built-into mediawiki (or at least, not into this instance of it) to archive pages so this has to be done by hand. There are a couple of possible approaches:
- Edit the current page. Select all the text and copy it to the editing computer's clipboard.
- Add to the page's location (in the editing browser's location field) the string '/Archive_20071225' (or whatever the date should be). This will open up an edit page for the new archive page. Copy the clipboard contents into here and save the page. This creates the archived page. Protect this page.
- Go back and edit the original page and delete most of the content and put in a link to the archive page, e.g. [[Talk:Rubbish/Archive_20071225]]
Alternatively
- Move the page to be archived to the archived version (e.g. [[Talk:Rubbish]] to [[Talk:Rubbish/Archive_20071225]]). Protect this page.
- Edit the original page (which is now a redirect, so follow the link from the archive page back to get to it) and delete the redirect e.g.:
#REDIRECT [[Talk:Rubbish/Archive_20071225]]
and add a link to the archived page, and any other text as required (such as links to previous archived versions).