Wikipedia's usual approach (not that we have to do everything they do) is to make archival subpages when the given talk page gets too long. Sorting through a history can be extremely difficult and time consuming, especially if one isn't looking for something in particular but rather simply wants to know what the discussion regarding a given article has been.
I don't think this has ever been discussed between the sysops. I'm just ''one '' of them and by no means chief among them. We can certainly put it up for discussion, though, which I've done on [[OrthodoxWiki:Administrators]]. —[[User:ASDamick|{{User:ASDamick/sig}}]] 19:09, 28 Jun 2005 (EDT)