Community Wishlist Survey 2017/Archive/Delay or stop archiving Talk pages

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Delay or stop archiving Talk pages

  • Problem: Talk pages get archived, and then editors have to slog through them to find out if a matter or question has been discussed or answered. No archive editing is allowed!
  • Who would benefit: Editors and even curious readers wanting to know why something is not included in an article.
  • Proposed solution: Either stop archiving altogether or perhaps only archive if extremely long. Currently, the amount is in KB which is silly. I would prefer no archiving at all.
  • More comments: Talk pages could also be lengthened far more so that much more can appear on each page vs. clicking Next. It's all text, and should load quickly enough.
  • Phabricator tickets:

Community discussion[edit]

Unfortunately this isn't really resolvable in that way. We've traditionally archived by size or timestamp, because: Massive talkpages have client-side performance problems, especially (and at even smaller sizes) on older/less-powerful computers/devices - partially because of all the links, and partially because of the HTML we're misusing to create indents (definition list HTML); Plus, it is not possible to easily agree on the subjective questions of "which topics should be left unarchived" - some might argue that most unanswered and answered questions should be left unarchived, because of the "interesting" factor. Additionally, the configuration and guidelines are different at every wiki. E.g. The English Wikipedia (your homewiki) has this general guideance (not guideline) w:en:Help:Archiving a talk page, but individual pages are each configured with different setups. I'd suggest you start a discussion at the English Wikipedia, on the linked talkpage, within which you should specify whether you mean all talkpages, all article-talkpages, or other. I'm going to move this proposal to the archive. Thanks for sharing the idea though! Quiddity (WMF) (talk) 21:55, 9 November 2017 (UTC)[reply]

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