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Vandalism and other actions by anonymous users (IPs) that provoke a talk page warning are very common on the English Wikipedia. Twenty years after the start of Wikipedia, there are hundreds of thousands of old IP talk pages with warnings, some stale by several years. Unless we take action, the number will continue to increase and over the decades they will become staler and less relevant to the current users of those IP addresses.
There have been a number of discussions and debates over the years about what to do with these pages. Some see them as valuable tools in finding systemic problematic behavior, particularly tracking long-term spamming of the site. Others see them as shrines to long-gone vandals, database bloat, or even a deterrent to the new user of that IP (after three or four years the vast majority of IP warnings will be associated with a completely different human or group of humans).
If you come across an old IP talk page, no action is necessary. If you wish, you can replace the contents of the page with an {{OW}} template, use a welcome message or archive the page. The rest of this essay covers situations in which page preservation or page deletion may be appropriate. It should however be noted that since deleted pages remain in the database, deletion clears no disk space.