I started Wikipeding in April 2010 by expanding a stub related to a village in North Lincolnshire (Alkborough). This is an ongoing project. However, my main interest is in the Roman Empire, and specifically Hadrian's Wall. I'm currently involved in a little project-ette to create entries for each of the Milecastles along Hadrian's Wall. It takes much longer than you might think!
First impressions of Wikipeding? There's always more that you want to do, than time you have to do it.
Archiving is used on talk and project pages (never on articles) to keep them from getting too long to be useful, while retaining older discussions in case somebody should need to refer to them.
The preferred method for archiving a talk page is to copy the older content to a series of subpages. This can be performed either by hand or automatically by a bot.