Reason and Means
Providing an edit summary, even with minor edits, helps other editors by informing them of the changes you made to the article. In addition to summarizing the changes, the edit summary may also be used to explain why said changes were made.
The edit summary should be entered in the field provided below the primary editing box.
Great care should be taken in writing an edit summary to be certain that all relevant changes are represented therein. Whether the changes were minor (alphabetizing, spelling or grammar correction, etcetera) or major (deletion of a paragraph, addition of new content, and so on), each should be noted in the edit summary. Furthermore, an edit summary cannot be edited itself once saved, thus, any spelling errors or other mistakes will remain.
As the edit summary box may hold only one line of two-hundred characters, the summary should be concise and to the point. Any extra information that is relevant to the edit may be submitted on the article's talk page.
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 you.
- Watchlist: List of pages editors are watching for modifications to.