Board Thread:Consensus Track/@comment-1732320-20160627020859/@comment-1251315-20160627190314

Omnibender wrote: there's no such thing as an archiving policy. So? Just because no policy exists (other than the stuff relating to user talkpage archiving on the talkpage policy) doesn't mean users can't go and archive pages. Lack of a policy does not mean users should be restricted from actually maintaining the wiki.

For example, a while back you archived an admittedly enormous portion of Hagoromo's talk page, stuff about him having or not having Byakugan if I recall, but the discussions was still extremely fresh. Yes, archiving talkpages just for the sake of it is pointless. Having several small archives creates pointless fragmentation of previous discussions, making it that harder to find when necessary. I didn't scroll through the whole discussion to see that it was active, which I admitted was a mistake at the time. Also, who cares if the archives are small? If we use your logic that "several small archives are pointless", then there's no issue with me going through many archives and combining them into larger archives (which really isn't as big of a problem as you are trying to make it that it is).

For example, if we simply archived stuff as soon as it became old, no matter the size, Asura's talk page would have a lot more than three archives No it wouldn't. Don't make up things that aren't going to happen.

Not archiving smaller talk pages also means questions like that are less likely to be asked, as the answer will be right there at the talk page instead of archived. Hardly likely to happen, I've archived numerous talkpages that are essentially dead. In fact, 90% of the wiki's talkpages are dead, because they're all for extremely "old" content that nobody needs to discuss or improve upon, because there's generally nothing to improve on a large number of articles.

The fact is, talk pages are still the place to go for having discussions about stuff that affects article content. Having smaller stuff, even if old, readily available in the talk page right then and there when checking makes it easier to discover relevant discussions instead of digging through archives, the likelihood of them being required is besides the point. No, you missed the point I was making. The fact is, talkpages are hardly ever used these days. Sure a few discussions got made today, but I can recall days or weeks where a talkpage is not used (excluding user talkpages). Why does it matter if talkpages are archived that are clearly for dead discussion topics?

On a separate note, could you please use paragraphs and not write one splodge of text? Very annoying and impossible to understand your comments when they're written as a text wall. >.>