Help:Edit Summary

Reason and Means

Providing an edit summary, including for minor edits, efficiently informs other editors of changes you make to pages. Explaining why you make changes is also often useful to others.

The edit summary should be entered in the field provided below the primary editing box, which appears like so:

Write edit summaries carefully. Reference all changes you make. Indicate whether the changes were minor (alphabetizing, spelling or grammar correction, et cetera) or major (deletion of a paragraph, addition of new content, and so on). You cannot change an edit summary after saving, so any spelling or other errors will remain.

The edit summary box allows only one line of two hundred characters, so be concise. Place additional relevant information on talk pages.

Where Edit Summaries are Displayed

Each edit summary appears in black italic format on the following pages:

• Page History: A listing of all changes made to the current article.
• Diff Page: Related to the page history, this page displays the changes made to the article.
• Recent Changes: A chronological list of all edits made within a set period of time.
• Related Changes: A list of changes made to those articles which are linked to the currently viewed page.
• User Contributions: A list of the edits made by a user.
• Watchlist: List of pages editors are watching for modifications to.