WARFRAME Wiki:Archiving

Since WARFRAME is an evolving live-service video game, often times previously accessible and valid in-game content will be depreciated and removed from the game, preventing players to access it in the future. In these cases, the associated articles/pages on the wiki may be tagged with {{Archived}}. Readers can still access this content like any other article on the wiki, but understand that the article's content is not applicable to the game in its current state. Usually they are not protected so that editors can still edit these articles for clean up or maintenance. The wiki will typically not delete depreciated content for the sake of preserving the game's history.

Archiving Guidelines[]

Use your best judgement when archiving articles. There is no catch-all methodology whether or not a particular article is tagged with {{Archived}}. Archiving decisions should be based on the current state of WARFRAME and whether or not a piece of content is obtainable/accessible by new players:

• Do archive when Digital Extremes, the developers, specifically name a large "game changing" mechanic/system update. For example, the transition from Melee 1.0 to Melee 2.0 or Focus 1.0 to Focus 2.0 to Focus 3.0.
  • Do archive when the developers make a major game mechanic/system change (not necessarily named) that invalidates an entire article's worth of information. In these situations it is best to start a new article from scratch. For example, the transition from the first iteration of Eximus enemies to their reworked counterpart in Update 31.5 (2022-04-27).
• Do archive when time-limited Events are over. Alternatively, use {{EventOver}}. For example, The Gradivus Dilemma and Operation: Orphix Venom.
  • Do not archive for repeatable events/alerts like Razorback (typically monthly) and Dog Days (yearly).
• Do archive when playable content is removed from the game like Solar Rail Conflict and 2V2 PVP.
• Do archive when an item is removed from the game like Arcane Distiller and Lephantis Nav Coordinates.
• Do archive when an item/content is replaced by some other equivalent item/content like Corpus Gas City (Old) and Orokin Derelict (Planet).
• Do not archive for ARGs like Solaris United ARG and Zariman ARG since these were never really applicable to in-game content. It's more of a community event than a discrete gameplay mechanic/system. Use {{EventOver}} instead.

Archiving Articles With Depreciated Templates or Articles With Removed Content[]

Editors can use Special:ExpandTemplates to get the raw wikitext or HTML output for a particular template in scenarios where a template will be archived (e.g. Template:FocusSimple with the depreciation of Focus 1.0) or the associated content is removed from the game (like Dirac), thus will not have its data stored in one of the wiki's open databases on WARFRAME Wiki:Updating Databases. Raw wikitext or HTML output can replace template transclusions like in User blog:ChickenBar/Void Drop Table 3.0 when Template:Icon was depreciated for Prime part icons.

Reading Archived Content or Article Revisions[]

The wiki mainly uses Internet Archive (https://archive.org/) to archive website citations, but the site can also be used to view old revisions of articles from a certain time period. Bot crawlers are used by Internet Archive to automatically archive high traffic web pages, but readers can manually input the article's URL to force archive a web page at that moment. This method is useful when:

• Readers want to read about old stats/mechanics for a particular weapon/Warframe/item. Most infoboxes are generated by Lua modules so formatted data is not snapshoted in time when using MediaWiki's revision history feature.
• Readers want to explore the wiki as it existed during X time period.
• Viewing deleted content or old assets.
• Wanting an ad-free viewing experience on an archived article. Trackers and third-party scripts are typically stripped from archived web pages.

https://archive.ph/ is a less established and simpler site for archiving web pages where readers will need to manually input the URL of the wiki article to archive it.

Google's web crawler occasionally stores cached versions of a website when indexing them. These can be accessed by third-party tools or going to Google's search results next to the site's URL.^[1]

MediaWiki has a source control system where readers have access to the revision history of any non-deleted article on the wiki. See https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Help:Page_history for more documentation on the topic. The main issue with this method is that depreciated templates and module calls may break the formatting of the article, making it unreadable. Highly recommend the use dedicated online archival sites instead like the ones stated above to preserve site formatting as it was at the time of archival.

Long Term Archiving[]

See WARFRAME Wiki:Contingency Plan for methods of archiving the wiki.

Examples of Archived Articles[]

References[]