Changes: Memory Alpha:Always fill summary field

Revision as of 11:57, 28 March 2007

This page describes one of Memory Alpha's policies and guidelines.
Please read through the policy below to familiarize yourself with our common practices and rules.
If you have any questions, suggestions, or complaints, please post them on the talk page.

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 italics on the Recent changes page and in the page revision history (see below). You should write a short summary of the changes you have introduced into the article. In addition (or alternatively), the summary field could explain why the change to the article was made, in order to allay the concerns of other contributors (in the case of potentially controversial or confusing edits). Longer explanations should go on the talk pages.

Always fill the summary is one of Memory Alpha's guidelines. In the day-to-day operations, with many people all making changes at various times, it's better to have some summary of the changes rather than no summary at all. The summary can help people decide whether they should go read all of the changes that were made in your edit, or whether it's not important enough. (This would be in addition to the "minor edit" feature; see Minor Edits.)

Abbreviations

Efficient contributors to Wikipedia have developed a number of abbreviations for the summary field: [1]

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, since it is used as a shorthand for "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

The following pages generated by the MediaWiki software will display the edit summaries:

Searching

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

Upload summary

When uploading an image, you can add an upload summary (see Image description page). If the upload is the first for a specific file name (i.e. it's creating a new Image: page), then the upload summary will also serve as the image description until it is edited. In all cases, the upload summary will be applied to the individual images that are uploaded.

@@ Line 38: / Line 38: @@
 | Applied [[Memory Alpha:Manual of Style|manual of style]] formatting
 |-
-| ''<nowiki>#REDIRECT [[other page]]</nowiki>''
+| ''<code><nowiki>#REDIRECT [[other page]]</nowiki></code>''
-| Made the page a redirect to <nowiki>[[other page]]</nowiki>
+| Made the page a redirect to <code><nowiki>[[other page]]</nowiki></code>
 |-
 | ''copyedit''
 | Miscellaneous copyediting
 |-
-| ''<nowiki>[[name of other article]]</nowiki>''
+| ''<code><nowiki>[[name of other article]]</nowiki></code>''
-| 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.
+| Added the link <code><nowiki>[[name of other article]]</nowiki></code> (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''
@@ Line 60: / Line 60: @@
 |-
 | ''disambig''
-| [[Memory Alpha:Disambiguation|Disambiguating]] a wiki link.  (e.g. changing <nowiki>[[PDF]] to [[Portable Document Format|PDF]]</nowiki>)
+| [[Memory Alpha:Disambiguation|Disambiguating]] a wiki link.  (e.g. changing <code><nowiki>[[PDF]]</nowiki></code> to <code><nowiki>[[Portable Document Format|PDF]]</nowiki></code>)
 |-
 | ''ft''
@@ Line 89: / Line 89: @@
 ==Upload summary==
 When uploading an image, you can add an upload summary (see [[Help:Image description page|Image description page]]).  If the upload is the first for a specific file name (i.e. it's creating a new Image: page), then the upload summary will also serve as the image description until it is edited.  In all cases, the upload summary will be applied to the individual images that are uploaded.
 [[de:Memory Alpha:Nutze die Zusammenfassung]]
+[[fr:Memory Alpha:Toujours remplir le champ Résumé]]