Wikinews:Calendaric archives

The Calendaric archives are under construction to provide a browseable archive of Wikinews, and hopefully to develop a model which will be easily integrated into newspage layouts.

Theory

Mediawiki allows the use of subpages. This is particularly useful for building an easily-navigated set of archives, so users may readily browse through past articles on a variety of criteria.

The example of how this is implemented in the calendaric archives is the use of Year, Month, and Day hierarchies. For articles which were released on January first, 2005, there is an archive at Wikinews:2005/January/01. At the top of this article are links to 2005 and 2005/January which are automatically generated. Clicking on 2005/January brings you to a page which includes all the articles published during the month of January, and includes links down to each page as well as the top-of-the-page link automatically generated to the year's archive. The link to 2005 will eventually have monthly summaries, as well as links down to each month's complete archive.

Method

Using separate pages for each day's new article provides the flexibility to use these pages in other templates, and to develop an integrated article archives system. Articles may be integrated from the workspace or from a special page; there will be several methods, with the article poster determining which would be best.

Each day's page is a simple unordered list containing the link to the article, plus a single-sentence synopsis or teaser. Because these pages might be included in many other layout schemes, simple and brief is the best course of action.

The pages are transcluded (by adding the page's content using a {{pagename}} tag) into the month's archive, allowing researchers to search through the whole month's accumulation. Summaries should written each month to cover the highlights of each month's news in the year page.

Implementing the archives site-wide

The primary places the archive pages are likely to be useful are on the Latest news template and similar, and as calendaric archives.

To implement the archives as a no-maintenance archiving system, it is necessary that they become a part of listing pages on the main page. This will entail making additions to the Latest news more easily, and from logical locations, so most if not all additions are made through the dated archive page.