Board Thread:Support Requests - Designing Your Wikia/@comment-25758952-20151221134708/@comment-452-20151221162421


 * 1) Move/Rename User_talk:SnidgetGirl to User_talk:SnidgetGirl/Archive1
 * 2) (optional) Edit the now-blank User_talk:SnidgetGirl to add a link to User_talk:SnidgetGirl/Archive1
 * 3) (optional) Edit User_talk:SnidgetGirl/Archive1 to note it's an archived page.

Some people copy/paste the content of the page to a new page. People who do this are in violation of the CC-BY-SA license, and the spirit of a wiki, by not retaining the page history. When someone wants to see the history of an archive page, they shouldn't have to go to a separate page to do it. By moving the page, the entire page history is moved with it.

Some people immediately protect the archive page, justifying it with "It's an archive, therefore no-one has a reason to edit it." Those people are ignoring point 2 on Help:Common mistakes. The purpose of page protection is to stop vandalism. Pages which have never been vandalised should not be protected. See also Community_Central:Protection.

Wikia Staff themselves have made the mistake of unnecessarily protecting user_talk pages when Message Wall is activated. I had them unlock user_talk pages so that anyone could edit them, and there has been 0 abuse of the fact that people can edit them.

I regularly edit people's talk page archives to remove old links, and add missing sigs - there is no reason to restrict this active to admins only.

I hope this helps!