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Something I've been noticing of late in discussions on AN and ANI has been the suggestion that a discussion be closed at a certain point. Heh. Of late? This has been going on for ages, unfortunately. Sometimes people are nice enough to ask, but in many cases some users will simply slap archive tags around a section, without so much as signing, and force you to trawl through the page history to find out what the hell happened and what you can do about it.
This is bad. Premature archival of discussion is bad. Why?
- We have MiszaBot II for a reason; that reason is to archive AN, ANI, and other project space pages.
- You are not a bot.
- Arbitrarily tagging a discussion as resolved and archived is annoying, especially if this isn't the case.
- The number of times someone will still be discussing something despite it being apparently "resolved" and being understandably confused is disappointingly high.
- Equally, it is confusing to be told something is archived when it's clearly not because, well, it's on the main discussion page still.
- Arbitrarily closing a discussion gives the illusion that certain users know best or are in charge of discussion. They're not.
- Often these archivings will take place because one argues a discussion has become an incivility/personal attack fest. We already have processes to deal with these things that don't involve ending the discussion for everyone else.
- Making a motion to close a discussion invites new discussion (concerning this motion). Just an irony I'd like to point out.
So what can you do about it? Well, simply, ignore silly early archivings. If something is marked as resolved but clearly isn't, keep talking, or if you're feeling brave, remove the resolved tag. If something is wrapped in silly archive tags but you still have something to say, remove the archive tags while you add your comment.
Letting a discussion die a premature death is detrimental and has zero positive effect on the project.