Editing Help:Archiving a talk page (section)

{{Short description|Advice on archiving completed discussions}}
{{About|archiving old discussions on a talk page|adding web archives to citations|Help:Archiving a source}}
{{redirect|WP:ARCHIVE|the help page on using the Wayback Machine|Help:Using the Wayback Machine}}
{{redirect-distinguish|WP:AATP|Wikipedia:Attack page}}
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{{Wikipedia how to|H:ARC|WP:ARCHIVE|WP:AATP}}
{{nutshell|This page explains how and why to set up archiving and archive search boxes on Wikipedia, offering multiple options and assessments of those options.|}}

Editors '''archive old discussions on a talk page''' when the talk page becomes too large. Archiving is often done automatically by a [[Wikipedia:Bots|bot]]. Step-by-step instructions can be found at '''[[Help:Archiving (plain and simple)]]'''. Two main bots archive talk pages:

* [[User:ClueBot III]] uses settings from [[User:ClueBot III/ArchiveThis]].
* [[User:Lowercase sigmabot III/Archive HowTo|User:Lowercase sigmabot III]] uses settings from [[User:MiszaBot/config]].

Archives can also be created manually. Manual archiving can be done [[Help:Archiving a talk page/Manual archiving|by hand]] by cutting and pasting from a talk page to an archive subpage. [[Wikipedia:One click archiving|One click archiving]] streamlines this process by adding an archive button to all talk page sections.

Only noticeboards and talk pages are archived because both can become very long. The [[Wikipedia:Talk page guidelines#When to archive pages|talk page guidelines]] suggest archiving when the talk page has multiple resolved or stale discussions. Older discussions that are still relevant can be summarized and linked using the {{Tlx|FAQ}} template.  Archiving one's own user talk page is preferred but optional; some users simply [[WP:BLANKING|blank the page]].