Help:Edit summary

When you edit a page, you have the option of providing an edit summary. Edit summaries are a short, publicly visible explanation of your changes that is saved with your edit. Edit summaries are optional, but it is usually good practice to provide one.

Writing an edit summary is as simple as typing in your summary into the "Edit summary" box. When you click '', your edit summary will be displayed alongside your edit in page histories, user contributions, and diff pages.

When writing your edit summary, keep these points in mind:


 * Summarize. Think about the changes you made, then describe them in a short sentence or two. A short summary is better than no summary at all.
 * Explain. Give reasons for the changes you made if you think someone might have questions as to why you made them.
 * Be specific. Simply saying "I made some changes" isn't any better than not leaving a summary at all.
 * Think it through. Edit summaries can't be changed, so don't write something you'll regret saying later.

Wiki markup
In general, wiki markup will not work in edit summaries. This means that formatting, such as  and , which would normally display as bold and italics, will be rendered as bold and italics in the edit summary. Templates and transclusions will also not work; typing in will render as  instead of the contents of Template:Main.

Wikilinks work inside edit summaries, so typing in  will provide a link to Main Page, and typing in   will display Link to the Main. External links can be pasted into edit summaries, but will not become clickable links, even if they are formatted in wiki markup correctly.

tags do not work inside edit summaries. This means that Main Page cannot be displayed as such. Attempting to surround wikilinks with  tags will render as   Main Page. To display wikilinks in their raw form, use [﻿[Main Page]] (with a zero-width space between the brackets on the left) or [ [Main Page] ] (separating the brackets with spaces) instead.

Preview
Edit summaries are previewed when the Preview button is clicked. They are shown below the edit summary box after the preview loads. This is a good way to check for mistakes in the summary, as they cannot be modified after the edit is saved.

Section links
When editing individual sections by clicking on section edit links, the edit summary field is prefilled with. These are automatically rendered as section links. For example,  would be rendered as:

test - &rarr;Foo: test

It is possible to edit these section links or remove them if desired.

Length
Edit summaries are limited to approximately 500 characters. If JavaScript is enabled in your browser, there is a counter that appears when the edit summary is over 400 characters in length and indicates how many characters are remaining in the edit summary. The counter will prevent any additional characters from being inserted if this limit is reached. If JavaScript is disabled, the browser's own character limit protection will be used and no counter will be displayed. If an edit summary longer than this limit is somehow inserted, the summary will be truncated to 500 characters when the edit is saved.

Searching
Edit summaries cannot be searched using the built-in search function, and they are not indexed by search engines.

Modifying
Edit summaries cannot be edited after they are saved. They can be hidden using the revision delete tool, but their contents cannot be changed otherwise.

Mentioning
You can mention, or "ping", users by simply linking to their userpage in the edit summary. They will receive a notification when this occurs. You cannot mention unregistered users or yourself, and you cannot use the Reply to template to mention users in edit summaries.

Automatic edit summaries
An automatic edit summary is one that is automatically left by the MediaWiki software in the absence of a user-written edit summary. These summaries only appear during specific circumstances; for example, an edit that creates a new page will have an edit summary that contains the first portion of the page's contents if the page creator did not fill in the edit summary field. They are usually used to spot vandalism, although edits with an automatic edit summary may not necessarily be vandalism, or even problematic. Automatic edit summaries are not a good substitute for a descriptive edit summary.