Template talk:Archive

Bug report

 You are invited to join the discussion at Wikipedia talk:Teahouse § Archive header is wrong. Sdkb ^talk 04:47, 15 July 2025 (UTC)

@Sdkb & Vchimpanzee, in the issue raised above, it would be fairly straightforward to change the text to "This is an archive of past discussions about Wikipedia:Teahouse." but it would be more complicated to get "This is an archive of past discussions on Wikipedia talk:Teahouse." There was a change done in the past to link from talk page archive banners to the article page. This works pretty well for articles, but quirks have come up outside of article space. I believe Andy came up with the idea, so I'll ping him for his thoughts, Rjjⁱⁱⁱ (talk) 05:09, 10 September 2025 (UTC)

@Rjjiii, could you move your comment to the Teahouse talk discussion per WP:TALKCENT? Thanks! Sdkb ^talk 03:25, 20 September 2025 (UTC)

Red links

The default situation is that an archive page does not have red links for future archives. As someone who manually archives, I find it cumbersome and awkward not to have a redlink so I can quickly and easily and accurately create the next archive. To ready the archive page for future manual archiving I have to add |noredlinks=no to the template. It's a minor thing, but an irritation nevertheless, as it's simply extra work that should not be necessary.

I've not looked back to see why it was made default that red links are not displayed. I can see that it would be acceptable if archives on a page were all automated, but if the archives are manually done then showing the red link would be of more benefit. Clicking on the red link immediately creates a new archive with the correct name and number (editors do make mistakes in naming and numbering which causes problems). Having a red link might also encourage editors to create a new archive page when the existing one is getting long (I do sometimes come upon some very long archive pages).

It is of course possible that other than auto-archiving there are reasons why not having a redlink is preferable for manual archiving, though other than personal taste I can't at the moment think of one.

Provided there are no practical issues with displaying a red link on an archive page which is not auto archived, would it be possible to default the template to displaying the red link? There may need to be some consideration given to the auto archiving software if defaulting to red links might cause problems there. SilkTork (talk) 19:09, 25 August 2025 (UTC)

Sounds like a bad default assuming most editors use automatic archiving. — Qwerfjkltalk 12:04, 19 September 2025 (UTC)

Human editors would use manual archiving, it's only bots that would use auto. And I assume that bots are not bothered by there being a red link. So you're right, it's a bad default as it restricts the ability of human editors to archive. SilkTork (talk) 21:30, 20 September 2025 (UTC)

SilkTork, to put it more precisely, most editors rely exclusively on automatic archiving, and so it would only be confusing to see a red link when looking at the archive. You can use a userscript to adjust how the archives display as much as you want. — Qwerfjkltalk 16:00, 21 September 2025 (UTC)

It's not confusing, it's restrictive. The red link is not for appearance sake, it enables a human editor to quickly and easily create the next archive (and without error) by clicking on it. Even when a page is automatically archived, it sometimes requires a manual archive because an event (an edit debate, or a news item, etc) has temporarily increased the length or amount of discussions on the talkpage. Having the red link allows people to quickly and accurately tidy up the talkpage, whether it is auto-archived or not. It gives people an easy choice. Suppressing the link removes that easy choice, and editors may not be aware of how to archive, or may be reluctant to go through that extra effort (small though it is, it is not the quick tap and go of the red link). The red link was created for the purpose of enabling editors to make a quick and accurate archive, but then someone added the code to conceal it. Not sure why someone would do that, as it then makes things more difficult for editors. Perhaps they were thinking that most editing is done automatically, and so it wasn't needed. But manual archiving is still done, and so it is still needed.

If you know of a userscript I'd welcome that personally until this issue is resolved, but that wouldn't solve the issue for other editors. I suspect we would get more (and more accurate) archiving done if the suppression were removed. Meanwhile, thank you for engaging with this. SilkTork (talk) 07:19, 22 September 2025 (UTC)

SilkTork, I had a go at writing a userscript, and found it was probably not straightforward to support all the various different ways {{Archives}} can be configured. But I think the simpler way to deal with this is just to archive to the latest archive. It might cause slight over-stuffing in some cases, but I don't think that's a terrible consequence (and some editors suggest a default archive size of 900k, so maybe not a problem after all). — Qwerfjkltalk 12:07, 22 September 2025 (UTC)

Thanks for trying the script, Qwerfjkl. I will consider just stuffing one archive page - if people are using the archives, it is mostly to search for previous conversations, so having one large archive could actually make searching easier than having several. In the meantime, if nobody is willing or able to turn off the red link suppression, then I'll continue to use "|noredlinks=no". SilkTork (talk) 03:04, 23 September 2025 (UTC)

Is it possible to lowercase the title?

Basically at User talk:guninvalid/archive 1 the template refers to me uppercase, but I prefer lowercase. Is it possible to change the title it uses? guninvalid (talk) 09:41, 19 September 2025 (UTC)

This, I think, not a template thing but a MediaWiki thing. If you copy the magic word {{BASEPAGENAME}} onto your talk archive and preview the edit, it will display in upper case. This template does have a |text= parameter that can accept any text. I have seen a few pages transclude material from a page in their userspace to create consistent custom archive headers as well. Rjjⁱⁱⁱ (talk) 16:40, 21 September 2025 (UTC)

Protected edit request on 6 September 2026

I propose changing "Do not edit the contents of this page" to "Please do not edit the contents of this page". Other templates like the ones under Template:Did you know nominations include "please" before and I think this would be a nice touch; I think it's a bit friendlier but still doesn't downplay the overall message. ~2026-48025-05 (talk) 16:57, 6 September 2026 (UTC)

Not done for now: thank you very much for your input! A look at this template's /doc page tells us that this is a very high risk template with more than a third of a million usages. An edit to a high risk template like this places a huge load on the WP server. As much as I agree that we should use amenities and "please" and "thank you" whenever we can, this kind of edit must wait for a more substantial change to this template. Again, thanks for your efforts to improve WP! P.I. Ellsworth , ed. – welcome! – 00:39, 7 September 2026 (UTC)

Note: this edit has been made to Module:Archive/config/sandbox for future application – please see result at Template:Archive/sandbox. P.I. Ellsworth , ed. – welcome! – 07:12, 7 September 2026 (UTC)