Help:Edit summary

An edit summary is a summary of an edit you make. You can write it in the Summary box under an edit window.

Description

The text written here, up to 200 characters, will appear in italics on the Recent changes page and in the page revision history (see also 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 try to fill the summary. In the day-to-day operations, with a dozen (or hopefully more!) 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 also Help: Editing.)

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, 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

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

Searching

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

Upload summary

When uploading an image, you can add an upload summary. 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.

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