Memory Alpha:Always fill summary field

When editing an article on Memory Alpha, there is a small field labeled "Add a summary of your edit" either above or to the right of the main edit-box. The image to the right shows what it looks like with the editing sidebar closed (above) and open (below).

The text entered in the summary box, 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. In the day-to-day operations of Memory Alpha, 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.) There are a few automatically generated edit summaries, but these are only used in special circumstances.

Abbreviations
Efficient contributors to Memory Alpha use a number of abbreviations for the summary field:

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:


 * Recent changes
 * User contributions
 * Page history
 * User watchlists
 * Related changes
 * New pages

Searching
Note that the Memory Alpha search function 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 is creating a new File: 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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