Help:Minor Edits
You don't need to be Editor-In-Chief to add or edit content to WikiDoc. You can begin to add to or edit text on this WikiDoc page by clicking on the edit button at the top of this page. Next enter or edit the information that you would like to appear here. Once you are done editing, scroll down and click the Save page button at the bottom of the page.
By contrast, a major edit is a version that should be reviewed to confirm that it is consensual to all concerned editors. Therefore, any change that affects the meaning of an article is not minor, even if the edit is a single word.
The distinction between major and minor edits is significant because editors may choose to ignore minor edits when reviewing recent changes; logged-in users might even set their preferences to not display them. If you think there is any chance that another editor might dispute your change, please, do not mark it as minor.
Users who are not logged into wikidoc are not permitted to mark changes as minor because of the potential for vandalism. The ability to mark changes as minor is another reason to register.
When to mark an edit as minor
- Spelling corrections
- Simple formatting (capitalization, punctuation, basic grammar, et cetera)
- Formatting that does not change the meaning of the page (e.g., adding horizontal lines, splitting one paragraph into two—where this is not contentious)
- Obvious factual errors (e.g., changing 1873 to 1973, where the event in question clearly took place in the 20th century.)
- Fixing layout errors
- Adding and correcting links
- Removing vandalism
Things to remember
- Any change to the source text (Wikitext), even if it does not affect the presentation of the page in HTML (if it involves adding a space or a line break, for example) will still be treated as a change according to the database.
- Marking a major change as a minor one is considered poor etiquette, especially if the change involves the deletion of some text.
- Reverting a page is not likely to be considered minor under most circumstances. When the status of a page is disputed, and particularly if an edit war is brewing, then it is better not to mark any edit as minor. Reverting blatant vandalism is an exception to this rule.
- If you accidentally mark an edit as minor when it was in fact a major edit, you should make a second edit, or dummy edit, noting that "the previous edit was major" in the edit summary. As a trivial edit to be made for this purpose, just opening the edit box and saving (changing nothing) will not work, neither will adding a blank space at the end of a line or a blank line at the end of the page—in these cases the edit is cancelled and the edit summary discarded. However, one can, for example, add an extra space between two words, or a line break. These changes are preserved in the wikitext and recorded as a change, although they do not change the rendered page.
- It may be worth communicating any disagreement about what is minor via Talk or a message to the contributor, being careful to avoid a flame war ("I thought your change was a bit more than minor—maybe I am being over-sensitive?"). There is a grey area, and many contributors will appreciate feedback on whether they've got it right.
Exceptions
An administrator can semi-automatically revert the edits of the last editor of a page; all such "rollback" reversions are marked as minor by the wiki software. This is because the cumulative effect of the edits and the rollback is nothing. The intended use of the rollback feature is for cases of vandalism, where the act of reverting any vandalism should be considered minor (and can be ignored in the recent changes list). This has the undesirable effect that if preferences have been set to hide minor edits, and an undesirable edit has not been marked minor, one sees that, but not a possible semi-automatic reversion, in Recent Changes and Enhanced Recent Changes.
See also
Acknowledgement and Attribution Regarding Sources of Content
Some of the initial content on this page may be incorporated in part from copyleft sources in the public domain including wikis such as Wikipedia and AskDrWiki. Drug information for patients came from the The National Library of Medicine. Infectious disease information may have come from the Centers for Disease Control (CDC). Differential Diagnoses are drawn from clinicians as well as an amalgamation of 3 sources: 1.The Disease Database; 2. Kahan, Scott, Smith, Ellen G. In A Page: Signs and Symptoms. Malden, Massachusetts: Blackwell Publishing, 2004:3; 3. Sailer, Christian, Wasner, Susanne. Differential Diagnosis Pocket. Hermosa Beach, CA: Borm Bruckmeir Publishing LLC, 2002:7 . ar:مساعدة:تعديل طفيف bg:Уикипедия:Малка промяна ca:Ajuda:Edició menor ja:Wikipedia:細部の編集 nl:Help:Kleine wijzigingsimple:Help:Minor edit sl:Pomoč:Manjše urejanje th:วิกิพีเดีย:การแก้ไขเล็กน้อย
