TRMN:Always fill summary field
 Please read through the policy below to familiarize yourself with our common practices and rules. |
- The following guide is adapted from the document written and executed by Memory Alpha.
When editing an article on the TRMN Wiki, there is a small field labeled "Add a summary of your edit" either above or to the right of the main edit-box.
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 the TRMN Wiki's guidelines. In the day-to-day operations, 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:
| Abbreviation(s) | What it means |
|---|---|
| "+" or "-" | Addition or removal, see rm. |
| at | Article type. Generally when adding the {{article type}} template. |
| bg | Background. Generally used with info for bginfo. |
| cat | Category. Changes to the category (wags also use "dog"). |
| chg | Change. Could be used in conjunction with several other abbreviations. |
| cite | Citation. Usually used when requesting or adding a citation. |
| cm | Comment. Commonly used on talk pages. |
| copyedit | Miscellaneous copyediting. |
| dup | Duplication, e.g. "-dup" or "rm dup". |
| disambig | Template:Ma. Used when disambiguating a link or adding a disambiguation link to the top of the article. |
| ex or ext | External. Generally used with lk for adding or removing external link(s). |
| fm, fmt, format, or MoS | Formatting. Applied Template:Ma formatting. |
| ft | What follows gives the full added text, it does not make sense to open the article unless you want to see the text in context or want to make another edit. |
| fx | Fix. This is generally used when a page (lk fx) or image (img fx) as been moved, requiring the links to be updated. |
| info | Information. Generally used with bg for bginfo. |
| lk(s) | Link(s). Could be used in conjunction with several other abbreviations. |
| rd | Redirect. Used when creating a redirect. |
| re or rep(s) | Reply. Commonly used on talk pages. |
| ref | Reference. Usually used when requesting or adding a reference. |
| rm or remov | Remove. Additions and removals are also sometimes abbreviated as "+" and "-". |
| rv | Revert. |
| see talk | An explanation/discussion of this edit is on the article's talk page. |
| sk or sort | Sortkey. Changes made to the Template:Ma. |
| sp | Spelling. Fixed spelling mistakes. |
| typo | Fixed typos (wags also use "tipo", "tyop", etc). |
| wikified | Created links / converted markup, especially of new articles. |
| wording | Changes to the wording of the article. |
[[name of other article]]
|
Added the link [[name of other article]] (maybe a bit of text too); this is especially useful if the link is to a new article, to draw people's attention to that, for people who keep track of pages on their watchlist, but not systematically of all new pages.
|
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:
Searching
Note that the 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 file 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 file description until it is edited. In all cases, the upload summary will be applied to the individual files that are uploaded.