Help:Edit summary

&larr; Help: Contents

When editing an article on OpenVistA Wiki there is a small field labeled "Summary" under the main edit box. It looks like this:



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 fill the summary is one of OpenVistA Wiki guidelines. 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:

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:


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

Searching
The OpenVistA Wiki 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 (see Image description page). 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.