Wikipedia talk:Read the archives

Untitled

While this suggestion makes a lot of sense, I'm afraid that saying it won't make people do it. Several talk pages have hundreds of kilobytes of archive, and people simply aren't going to read through them before making the point they wish to make. That's one of the reasons why the village pump has a "perennial proposals" section. Bottom line - if there's anything relevant in the archives, provide a diff or a link. Radiant_>|< 13:51, August 30, 2005 (UTC)

From a practical, pragmatic standpoint, your concern rings true. But I don't see how reminding them they have that responsibility can hurt. The convention at the better run, heavily-used discussion forums and usenet groups is that new arrivals need to educate and familiar themselves with the state of the current debate if they are to participate, and especially if they want be taken seriously early on. It's not the responsibility of the longer-term editors to educate every new user who thinks they've got the killer new argument, which usually proves in the end to be something seen many times before (and just copied from some other website). If it were the regular's responsibility to educate each new arrival, no progress would ever be made as the same issues will be repeated re-hashed again and again until the newbie understands (or gives up), which is something we're already seeing at some articles and that needs to be addressed. You're also right about the daunting size of some archives discouraging new editors from reading them. This is why I included the suggestion that it's up to long-term editors to cull from the a FAQ to point new users to; I feel that's more than meeting the newbies half way, and if they can't be bothered to do that, then they have no basis for complaints, right? FeloniousMonk 19:31, 2 September 2005 (UTC)

support

As a long time usenet user from the days before AOL I can tell you the usenet FAQs were vital for keeping boards from discussing the same thing over and over and over. Archive talk pages really aren't that long for almost every article and for those it is, a FAQ would be fine. jbolden1517^Talk 00:51, 13 June 2006 (UTC)