Two common methods of naming archives are sequential and chronological. Archive navigation templates use assumptions about the page names to locate archives. These templates will not automatically list subpages with unusual names.
Sequential
editThe most common, and easiest, method is sequentially numbered archives. Archive pages should be named as follows: take the name of the talk page, and add "/Archive #", where "#" is the number of the archive. Note that the word Archive has a capital A, there is a space before the number, and there are no leading zeros. Templates like {{Archive list}} rely on this naming convention to automatically find the archive pages.
For example:
- The 20th archive of Talk:Earth would be named
Talk:Earth/Archive 20 - The first archive of User talk:Example would be named
User talk:Example/Archive 1
Talk page templates that automatically detect archives will ignore numbers that are:
- zero
- negative
- not whole numbers
- out of sequence
Chronological
editThe second common method of naming archive pages is by year and month. With this method archive pages are typically named Talk:YourPage/Archives/2013/June, Talk:YourPage/Archives/2013/July, etc. Some things are more complex with this method of naming. When using this naming scheme the subpages should use /Archives/ not /Archive/ as some of the navigation templates rely on Archives being plural.