Is archived a word

IMO, «archived» implies that this is a somewhat permanent store of this information.

Granted, archives can be purged, so the implication of permanence is not absolute, but I believe it’s a fairly common perception.

The historical lock is there because these questions have value to the users and the Internet as a whole; while they are no longer a good fit for Stack Overflow, they are important in general and should be preserved.

But they’re still not good candidates for Stack Overflow.

I don’t believe that it’s there to indicate that it’s the final resting place of these questions; it’s been kicked around that these questions should be archived off-site. Whether or not that comes to fruition remains to be seen, but it’s in no way unfeasible.

If/when the day that we have a real archive for these questions that is separate, but linked to the Stack Exchange sites proper (maybe another «dimension» as Jeff would call it, like meta and chat), then it would be appropriate to call that an archive.

We don’t want to cross-contaminate the site with good content that is suitable for the site, and content that isn’t suitable to the site, but still of value to people and the Internet as a whole.

With all of that in mind, I believe using the term «archive» would be a bad idea, because the «historical significance» lock is meant to be used very sparingly and implies that the content belongs here, when it clearly states in the lock reason that it doesn’t.

The other lock reasons, do not indicate that the content should not be here, but rather, the content (or the management of that content) is having adverse effects.

02
Dec

For some, the word archive evokes dusty documents stuffed into boxes, stacked in a corner and forgotten. Boxes that we dare not approach for fear of not finding THE document that we have been trying to track down for weeks. Others imagine ancient manuscripts tucked away in museum basements, reserved only for gloved researchers and inaccessible to the public. How is it that one word can evoke such vastly different images in the mind?

Let’s explore the origins of the word “archive” to find the answer and better understand what it is today…

Archive comes straight from antiquity. It refers to the prefix “archae-” and comes from the Latin “archium” or “archivum”, which itself comes from the Greek name “archeion,” a derivative of the word “arch.” “Arch” means both the beginning or the principle.

But the most learned are divided on the meaning of the word. For some experts the word refers to “very old things”, while for others it refers instead to a place, the residence of the main magistrates of the Greek world.

Knowing this, it’s easier to understand why archive can be a document we set aside as well as a place where we keep nuggets of history, like the archives of the famous Smithsonian Institute and the Archives of France

Archiving through the ages

The need to store important documents that prove rights and responsibilities has been around for more than 2 500 years. Indeed, King Philip IV of France saw archiving as such an essential function that he created the position of guarding the archives of the Kingdom, called the Treasury of The Charters and parliamentary records.

Initially preserved for legal purposes, archived documents have gradually become an essential source of information for historians since they used them for their own research and refer to them as well quite often. Also interesting to note is that archive is seldom used in the singular form. Much more popular is the plural archives, which first appeared in French in 1416 in the consular registers of the French city of Lyon.

“A reflection of the activity of individuals and organizations”

The International Council of Archives now defines archives as “the documentary product of human activity retained for their long-term value. They come in a range of formats – written, photographic, audio-visual – in digital or analogue form. Archives are maintained by public and private organizations around the world

Therefore, archives are a real-time reflection of the activity of individuals and organisations, and they provide a direct view of past events.

In France, two main categories of archives stand out for public archives today: on the one hand the central archives (national and senior branches of the civil service), and the local archives (departmental, communal, hospital, business, etc.). But a third meaning has emerged: the services and institutions that take care of records management.

Various archival formats

The archives now cover several different formats. They can be physical or digital, classified as current, intermediate or definitive depending on their use. They are often subject to a conservation policy and a classification plan in companies or institutions.

If today archive is a word that is familiar to us all, it is in part because literature has highlighted it many times.

Like the 18^th century French writer, politician, diplomat and historian Châteaubriand, who said: “The songs of Pindare form, together with Homer’s works, the brilliant archives of Greece.” Or the author Milan Kundera: “It is in the files of the police archives that our only immortality is found.” Or the American writer, poet and literary critic Edgar Allan Poe, who used it very differently: “Grey hair is an archive of the past.”

Do you have any questions and would like to talk to an expert? Contact us.

For those interested in a little info about this site: it’s a side project that I developed while working on Describing Words and Related Words. Both of those projects are based around words, but have much grander goals. I had an idea for a website that simply explains the word types of the words that you search for — just like a dictionary, but focussed on the part of speech of the words. And since I already had a lot of the infrastructure in place from the other two sites, I figured it wouldn’t be too much more work to get this up and running.

The dictionary is based on the amazing Wiktionary project by wikimedia. I initially started with WordNet, but then realised that it was missing many types of words/lemma (determiners, pronouns, abbreviations, and many more). This caused me to investigate the 1913 edition of Websters Dictionary — which is now in the public domain. However, after a day’s work wrangling it into a database I realised that there were far too many errors (especially with the part-of-speech tagging) for it to be viable for Word Type.

Finally, I went back to Wiktionary — which I already knew about, but had been avoiding because it’s not properly structured for parsing. That’s when I stumbled across the UBY project — an amazing project which needs more recognition. The researchers have parsed the whole of Wiktionary and other sources, and compiled everything into a single unified resource. I simply extracted the Wiktionary entries and threw them into this interface! So it took a little more work than expected, but I’m happy I kept at it after the first couple of blunders.

Special thanks to the contributors of the open-source code that was used in this project: the UBY project (mentioned above), @mongodb and express.js.

Currently, this is based on a version of wiktionary which is a few years old. I plan to update it to a newer version soon and that update should bring in a bunch of new word senses for many words (or more accurately, lemma).

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