Help:Editing a summary

We're sorry, but as much as the folks at MediaWiki hate to say it, editing a summary of a MediaWiki edit has been made intentionally prohibited, and it's all due to the way MediaWiki was designed. Of course, we mean it when we say this, and although there is a standing joke about Wikipedians like you having the experience of wishing they could ever edit a particular edit summary, users have to be fully aware that it is presumably way too tempting a power to entrust in anybody but those so-called developers (who probably never do it, unless to prove nothing is truly impossible, which may or may not be true, if you're wondering).

But hold your horses, dear readers, as believe it or not, it is possible to create a summary in a page's history without changing the page's rendering, and thus comment on a summary without making even the simplest change to the (rendered) page. What does this mean? For example, changing something like how many spaces a line ends with (yes, we know it's dumb), so the server sees some difference in the markup, rather than a true null-edit, because, of course, some difference is still a difference. (This is probably always what is meant by a "dummy edit" - don't laugh, cause that's what the folks call it). And that makes it possible to create a summary that will appear near a recent edit (not inside it), in its history (and in your contributions, if the edit you wished you could edit was your own, which, in fact it is!).