Should Wikipedia users archive their talk pages?
This resource is a wikidebate, a collaborative effort to gather and organize all arguments on a given issue. It is a tool of argument analysis or pro-and-con analysis. This is not a place to defend your preferred points of view, but original arguments are allowed and welcome. See the Wikidebate guidelines for more.
By archiving talk pages we mean creating separate archive pages rather than leaving the past conversations in the page revision history.
Wikipedia users should archive their talk pages
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Pro Failure to archive is disrespectful to those who formulated their ideas in a discussion on the user talk page. It removes not only the copyrighted creations of the user in question but also the copyrighted creations of other discussion participants.- Pro Failure to archive makes it difficult for others to see what has already been discussed with the user, which makes administration more difficult.
- Pro Failure to archive makes it more difficult to detect problematic users. Since, problematic users receive complaints on their talk pages.
Con
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Con Users should have right to privacy, right to be forgotten to some extent.
Objection That is a very limited implementation of that right since what the user wrote in public discussion fora stays anyway.
- Objection There is still a considerable effect since anyone can quickly see what is on the user talk page, but it is much harder to find all the potentially problematic posts of the user in the discussion fora. And as long as users are often talked to in order to regulate their behavior, the user talk page has a much higher tendency to act as a transgression record than e.g. a discussion contribution history.
- Con Users should have the right to remove messages that they find problematic, which contradicts proper archiving.
- Objection One can combine removing problematic messages with proper archiving. Such a combination still stands in contrast with quasi-archiving into revision history via deletion.
