Board Thread:Administrator's Noticeboard/@comment-22434585-20150207063320

In my personal experience, when one needs to look something up in this wiki's archives, they have to do a great deal of searching through... well, mostly gibberish. We have a lot of archives over here, and they're hard to look through.

First of all, before we get started: thought I do understand that you may not have trouble searching the archives, but that does not necessarily mean it is unnecessary. I, for one, have troubles. To help us get a realistic viewpoint on how necessary this is, I would appreciate your just speaking your mind on how real this issue is to you. I only have myself to go off of.

My suggested system would rotate around a single new page, probably Terraria Wiki:Archives (TW:ARCHIVES). In separate sections on it, it would have lists of types of archives - forum, rights nomination, etc. This would allow users to easily access archives. They would be in date order, for easy organization.

The other things I'd like to change are the update frequency and the names. Under this new system (remember, all parts of this are give-and-take, so only some - if any - would be implemented) archives would be updated much more frequently, so as to reduce clutter on each page. TW:ARCHIVES was conceived after I thought of the large amount of archive pages that would result.

The name part of the idea is to store archives in an easy "chain name" format. For example, an archive for the administrator rights nominations that was archived on February 6, 2015 would read as follows:

Terraria Wiki:Admin and Bureaucrat Nominations/Archives/Feb 22, 2015

Other pages would be similar.

As an alternate or complementing solution, Forze proposed a category (probably Category:Archives) that could be applied to all pages through use of the archive template, making categorizing (but not really organizing) of archives autonomous. I think this would work well when used with the name and/or archive frequency ideas.

Please remember that wiki work does not come particularly easy to me, and there's probably something I'm overlooking - especially this late at night. I would appreciate holes in this theory to be looked at and, hopefully, patched so that the wiki can benefit from this plan directly or from another, inspired, idea. 