Working With MediaWiki

which is not very helpful, so you might as well manually type in your name and the data, instead of using the tildes, in that case.
    Now it’s time to wait — a response could come in the next hour, or in the next month, or of course not at all. You can keep checking the talk page, or monitor it via one of the many ways of monitoring MediaWiki pages — recent changes, watchlist, RSS/Atom, email, etc.
    If no response appears within a certain period of time (entirely up to you), you can feel free to make the change you were thinking of making — you can even make the change at the same time as you post the talk page question, so that you don’t have to deal with it again until a response comes.
    Now, what happens if a discussion does ensue on the talk page? There’s a standard syntax that’s used. As we saw in the MediaWiki syntax chapter, colons are used for indenting paragraphs, and in the case of talk pages each message is usually intended one further than the previous message. After five or six colons, though, the discussion usually goes back to no colons, for the sake of both sanity and readability, and then the pattern begins again. And if a person’s statement is more than one paragraph, each paragraph should begin with the same number of colons.
    As before, every statement should end with the user’s signature, set by typing "~~~~".
Archiving
    If a talk page starts to get very long, the solution is to archive old comments. Unfortunately, there’s no way to do that automatically — it has to be done by hand. You do that by copying some or all of the current talk page into a separate page that’s a subpage of the main page, i.e. a page with the name "Talk: name of page / something else ". Then the relevant content is removed from the current talk page, and a link is placed in the talk page to that archive page.
    Templates help a lot when archiving talk pages. Usually two templates are used: one to be placed at the top of the talk page, that holds links to all the archive pages for that talk page, and another to be put at the top of archive pages, explaining that this is an archive page and linking back to the talk page.
    There’s no need to create these two templates from scratch: you can copy them from any wiki that does talk page archiving. On the English-language Wikipedia, for instance, they can be found at the pages “Template:Archives” and “Template:Talk archive”, respectively. You could consider going with the two templates at mediawiki.org as well, which have a simpler layout and use a nice file-cabinet image (which itself also would have to be copied over — File:Replacement_filing_cabinet.svg — or you can use the InstantCommons feature to use the image directly; see here ). You can find these two templates at "Template:Archive box" and "Template:Archive" on the mediawiki.org wiki.
    On Wikipedia, archiving is usually done when the talk page reaches over 35 KB or so, and the archive pages are usually given sequential numbers: the first archive page is called “Talk: page name /1”, the second one is called “Talk: page name /2”, etc. This works fine, although we recommend an alternate approach for naming: using the date within the name, so that the subpage is called “/2012” or “/May 2012 to January 2013” or “/May 2012”, etc., depending on the span of time contained within the archive. This makes it easier for users to find a particular old discussion, if they can remember approximately when it happened. There’s no reason, however, to set the frequency of archiving based on this: just because you have archive pages named “2011” and “2012” doesn’t mean that you need a page named “2013”, if there’s not enough content for that one year.

LiquidThreads
    This basic setup works fairly well for most discussions, on Wikipedia and many other wikis. However, there are problems with this approach. For one, it’s not all that user-friendly: users have to learn a new mini-syntax just to be able to make comments. Second, it lets users modify one another’s comments, which is sometimes useful (in the case of vandals), but most of the time just leads to problems if it’s done. Third, it doesn’t allow for true threaded discussions: if you see a comment halfway through a discussion and you specifically want to respond to that one, it’s difficult to do that in a way that makes what you’re doing clear to readers of the page, and doesn’t interrupt the flow of