Help:Archiving a talk page/Manual archiving

Manual methods of archiving a page

Cut and paste procedure

Simplified procedure for archiving

Edit the talk page, copying material you wish to archive to your computer's clipboard. Create an archive by searching for "User talk:username/Archive N" where N is the lowest whole number for which no archive exists. Your archive will be the N-th archive. Searching should say that this page does not exist. Click the provided link to create/start it. Paste the clipboard contents into this archive and add {{Talk archive}} to the top and bottom of the code. Publish the new archive. Delete copied material from main talk page with edit summary mentioning the name of the new archive. If an archive box doesn't already exist on the main talk page, add the line {{Archives}} below the WikiProject tags and publish. (This will not be necessary if the main talk page already contains the line {{Talk header}}, since this template automatically contains a list of archives). That is it, you are finished!

Step-by-step procedure

1. Click on the Edit source tab for the talk page you wish to archive.
2. In the edit box, highlight all the text you want to archive, right-click (Windows/Linux) or control-click (Mac) and then select cut (also Ctrl+X, ⌘ Cmd+X for Mac). The text will then be copied to your clipboard. Any WikiProject header templates should remain on the main talk page and should not be cut and pasted to an archive page.
3. While still in the edit window, make a link to the archive name you plan on creating – you can link directly to a subpage by putting a slash (/) in front of it.
   • If you're making a topical archive, use the name of the topic, for example [[/Place of birth debate]].
   • If you're just archiving old discussion, use the next available number; so if the last archive page was Archive 3, call it [[/Archive 4]].
   • If there are no archives yet, call it [[/Archive 1]].
   • Archive links can be conveniently placed in an archive template (How to do this is described in the archive box section below)
4. Click Publish changes. (It's helpful to include an Edit summary like "Archiving old material".) You should now have a page of recent discussion with a red link to your archive at the top.
5. Open the newly created subpage by clicking the red link. Paste the old discussions from your clipboard into the edit box.
6. Add {{Talk archive}} to the top and bottom of the page. This adds a notice explaining that the page is an archive, and links back to the main talk page.
7. If this is a numbered archive, you can add a navigation template to make it easier to navigate through to other numbered archives. See the section Automated archiving.
8. Publish changes. You have now created an archive.

Semi-automated procedure

OneClickArchiver and Archy McArchface are userscripts designed to simplify the above manual procedure. Instead of manually copying and pasting the text, these script allows you to simply check which sections you wish to archive and specify a page to archive the selected sections to.

Other manual procedures

Other procedures were once considered equal options with the procedure described above. Over time both methods fell out of use and are generally not used. If you have used the page move procedure those pages do not qualify for speedy deletion by user request.