Help:Archiving articles
This information is for wiki editors that want to archive old articles when a new major version comes.
Archive namespace and archive category purpose is to:
- Collect easy to find versions of:
- Articles that never change title, but periodically have major rewrite; example is Product highlights and couple more bound to current release.
- Old articles that are no more current, but we as community want to keep them for historical reasons, or few more legitimate reasons.
- They are NOT meant to collect random, or in extreme case every article change; for that purpose exists article's history that MediaWiki software creates and maintains automatically. If someone wants, for any reason, to present specific version they all have links for easy access.
As it is mentioned above, it is possible to look trough wiki article history for archived version of articles, but that would require either that:
- every wiki editor provides understandable comment before saving article; which is not always the case, even for major rewrites,
- or have ability to add or edit comments, which would be useful in few scenarios, but contradicts in other that involve legal issues,
Additional disadvantages are:
- it is asking more knowledge from wiki visitor to find such version, as it may be hidden in a article history; this is specially problem for articles with a lot of revisions
- such version will always have at the top a version browsing paragraph,
- there is no way to correct article; example of such need would be article providing information about unsupported version that some people, for one or another reason, still use.