Memory Alpha:Always fill summary field

Edit summary

When editing an article on Memory Alpha there is a small field labeled "Summary" under the main edit-box. It looks like this:

The text written here, up to 200 characters, will appear in black italics on the Recent changes page and in the page revision history (see also below).

In the case of a small addition to an article it is highly recommended to copy the full text of this addition to the summary field, giving a maximum of info with a minimum of effort. Put "ft" in front, as abbreviation of "full text"; this way the reader knows that checking the edit further does not make sense. These kinds of edits with this code "ft" allow checking of Recent changes, Page history and User contributions (see below) very efficiently, both for the user and for the servers.

If the addition is more than 200 characters you should write a short summary of the changes you have introduced into the article. For an addition of e.g. 400 characters you can also save time by simply copying that into the summary field, the excess will fall off, and the first 200 characters will usually be acceptable as a crude "summary".

In addition to a summary of the change itself, the summary field may also contain an explanation of the change; note that if the reason for an edit is not clear, it is more likely to be reverted, especially in the case that some text is deleted. To give longer explanation, use the Talk page and put in the edit summary "see Talk".

After saving the page the summary can not be edited, an extra reason to avoid spelling errors.

Always fill the summary is one of Memory Alpha guidelines. We've found that even a short summary is better than no summary. However, mentioning a change but not another one can be misleading to someone who finds the other one more important; add "and misc." to cover the other change(s).

In addition to the distinction major/minor change (see Memory Alpha:How to edit a page), accurate summaries help people decide whether it is worthwhile for them to check a change. We've found that summaries often pique the interest of wikipedians with an expertise in the area. This may not be as necessary for "minor changes", but "fixed spelling" would be nice even then.

In the case of important omissions or errors in the edit summary, you can make a dummy edit just to put the correction in the edit summary, see also Memory Alpha:How to edit a page#minor edits.

Abbreviations

Efficient contributors have developed a number of abbreviations for the summary field:

Abbreviation(s)	What it means
"+" or "-"	Addition or removal, see rm or remove
typo	Fixed typos (wags also use "tipo", "tyop", etc)
sp	Fixed spelling mistakes
lk(s) or link(s)	Added link(s)
ext lk / link(s)	Added external link(s)
wikified	Created links / converted markup, especially of new articles
fmt,  fm,  formatting, or MoS	Applied manual of style formatting
#REDIRECT [[other page]]	Made the page a redirect to [[other page]]
copyedit	Miscellaneous copyediting
[[name of other article]]	Added the link name of other article (maybe a bit of text too); this is especially useful if the link is to a new article, to draw people's attention to that, for people who keep track of pages on their watchlist, but not systematically of all new pages.
rv	Reverted a previous edit (this short summary is sufficient only in the case of an obvious error or obvious vandalism)
see Talk	An explanation/discussion of this edit is on the article's talk page.
rm or remove	Additions and removals are also sometimes abbreviated as "+" and "-" (e.g. "+official website link")
dup	Duplication, e.g. "-dup" or "rm dup"
disambig	Disambiguating a wiki link. (e.g. changing [[PDF]] to [[Portable Document Format|PDF]])
ft	What follows gives the full added text, it does not make sense to open the article unless you want to see the text in context or want to make another edit.
cm	A comment was added to this page. This is most commonly used on talk pages.

Avoid "-" (single hyphen) as separation sign, it gives confusion with the meaning "remove".

"Post a comment" feature

When starting a new thread on a Talk page, optionally the "Post a comment" feature can be used. Then the edit summary is automatically the same as the new section header.

Places where the edit summary appears

Lists of edits that the system can produce (containing some or all of their edit metadata):

• all edits from a given time and/or up to a given number: Recent changes
• for a given page: Page history
• by a given user: User contributions

Lists of pages that have been changed, from a selection of pages:

• from a user's list of watched pages, from a given amount of time ago: Watchlist (logged-in users only)
• from the pages linked from a given page, from a given amount of time ago and/or up to a given number: Related changes

This shows the edit summary of the last edit. Since one is typically interested in all recent changes in these articles, with all edit summaries, these features are used in conjunction with the page histories of the articles shown.

List of new pages:

Shows the edit summary of the creation.

Searching

The Memory Alpha search can not search edit summaries, and they are not indexed by Google.

Upload summary

When uploading an image one can supply an upload summary, see Image description page. It serves as edit summary for the creation of the image description page (in the case that the file name of the image is new) and as second part of the automatically created edit summary of the upload log (the first part giving the file name).

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Source: Wikipedia: Edit summary http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Edit_summary (2003-12-27, 20:42 UTC)