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Minor edits?

Z

Zekurom

is obsessed with Noivern!
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I notice there's no instructions on how minor edits are supposed to work. Could I make one, or could one of the staff members make one?

As I understand them, here's the rule of thumb that I use, from the Wikipedia article on minor edits:

Any edit that changes the meaning of the article is a major edit.
 
MAGNEDETH said:
whether you consider your edit minor or not is left to the editor's discretion. it doesnt effect anything except whether or not your edit gets a tiny 'm' next to it.
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Alright, then...

I always thought there was something more important than that. Guess not.
 
Depending on the wiki, minor edits can have deeper meaning, but in a lot of instances it's ignored.
Generally, you'd mark your edit as minor if it's something that doesn't change a lot (fixing errors, so on); if someone chose to "hide minor edits" in the RecentChanges, or their watchlist, they'd be able to focus on only the bigger changes.
However, what people consider to be a major or minor edit varies, and there are always those who would mark an edit as minor in an attempt to hide it (or people like me, who have the "mark all my edits as minor" setting turned on).
Not to mention, if you're patrolling, you've got to check all the edits anyway.

In our case, you can see pretty much every edit made over the course of the day on the RecentChanges without having to scroll through multiple pages (most of the time), so there's not much point in hiding minor edits. A place like Wikipedia, on the other hand, is probably just about impossible to make sense of if you're looking at their RecentChanges without disabling minor edits.

That's not to say you or us shouldn't try to raise a bit of awareness on it (it's a handy feature when it is used correctly), but I don't personally believe many people will pay much attention to it even if it is brought up.
 
Jioruji Derako said:
That's not to say you or us shouldn't try to raise a bit of awareness on it (it's a handy feature when it is used correctly), but I don't personally believe many people will pay much attention to it even if it is brought up.
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So... in our current situation, would an article or policy entry on it be useful? That's what I want to ask, so that I or some staff member can create one. I understand that not many people will follow it - even on Wikipedia, not many people are well versed on how to use minor edits.
 
If we create a policy, then it needs to be enforced. And I'm not prepared to growl at or block people because they haven't done something that won't make much difference to the site overall. You also need to understand that the Bulbapedia demographic is quite different from Wikipedia demographic. As much as I like and appreciate the idea of minor edits, I don't think it will work for us.
 
YOU CHANGED THE LINK FROM [[PIKACHU]] TO {{P|PIKACHU}} AND DIDN'T HIT THE CHECKMARK. YOU ARE BLOCKED FOR FIVE WEEKS.
 
However, it could be mentioned somewhere as a unenforced guideline (mentioned somewhere in a larger article, perhaps something explaining how editing and previews work). Simply so users know what it actually means, why it's there, and how they should use it if they do decide to utilize the feature.
 
Jioruji Derako said:
However, it could be mentioned somewhere as a unenforced guideline (mentioned somewhere in a larger article, perhaps something explaining how editing and previews work). Simply so users know what it actually means, why it's there, and how they should use it if they do decide to utilize the feature.
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That's the kind of thing I was aiming for, so...
 
Zekurom said:
That's the kind of thing I was aiming for, so...
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Well, if you can find a spot for it, it's fine if you want to write something up. (good places would be the few pages we have that explain how a wiki works to newer users.)
Most likely most of those articles are protected, but you can make your edit on the talk page if you like.
 
I was planning to revise Help:Editing as a general help page for editing rather than just wikicode; perhaps I should include it there?
 
Please note: The thread is from 15 years ago.
Please take the age of this thread into consideration in writing your reply. Depending on what exactly you wanted to say, you may want to consider if it would be better to post a new thread instead.
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