Help talk:Minor edit/Archive 2

What happens when someone sets their preferences to not display minor edits?
I've always wondered - if someone has their preferences to not display minor edits, will the last major edit for a page still appear in their watchlist or will that page not appear in their watchlist at all? --Jpcase (talk) 21:56, 6 December 2014 (UTC)


 * The page doesn't appear at all, unless they have enabled "Expand watchlist to show all changes, not just the most recent" at Special:Preferences. This confuses many users. I recently added mention of it to Help:Watching pages.[//en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Help:Watching_pages&diff=634317552&oldid=634263545] PrimeHunter (talk) 22:07, 6 December 2014 (UTC)


 * Sorry for the late reply and thanks for the answer! Perhaps an explanation could be added to this Help page as well? --Jpcase (talk) 03:30, 13 December 2014 (UTC)

Semi-protected edit request on 4 March 2015
You didn't mentioned about the main big caste of Mianchannu residing on the bank of River Ravi and "Maher Dullu". It can be verifiable. Thanks and warm regards

Khuram Dullu.

Khuram2703 (talk) 11:15, 4 March 2015 (UTC)

If you want to suggest a change, please request this on the talk page of the relevant article, in the form "Please replace XXX with YYY" or "Please add ZZZ between PPP and QQQ". Please also cite reliable sources to back up your request, without which no information should be added to, or changed in, any article. - Arjayay (talk) 14:42, 4 March 2015 (UTC)
 * Red information icon with gradient background.svg Not done: as you have asked in the wrong place, this page is only to discuss improvements to Help:Minor edit.

Semi-protected edit request on 6 July 2015
i wantmore info about the content in earth. have tried a lot

Keya sbksug (talk) 13:02, 6 July 2015 (UTC)

Your question is unclear, but I suggest you try asking at Reference desk/Science - Arjayay (talk) 13:47, 6 July 2015 (UTC)
 * Red information icon with gradient background.svg Not done: as you have asked in the wrong place, this page is only to discuss improvements to Help:Minor edit.

Semi-protected edit request on 6 September 2015
< > 131.170.90.3 (talk) 01:51, 6 September 2015 (UTC)
 * Red information icon with gradient background.svg Not done: this is the talk page for discussing improvements to the page Help:Minor edit. Please make your request at the talk page for the article concerned. -- John of Reading (talk) 06:34, 6 September 2015 (UTC)

Quickly checking the minor edit box
Here's an idea for a tip: when filling in the edit summary, press Tab to check the minor edit box quickly. &mdash;George8211 / T 09:06, 22 July 2015 (UTC) Above was posted at talk page of TOTD and would be helpful here as well. Regards, JoeHebda   talk  15:27, 7 January 2016 (UTC)

Is not adding/removing articles tags and template messages a minor edit?
Currently, it is considered a "major edit" to add or remove tags and templates, which flag problems in the quality of an article; however, I do not think that giving just a heads-up would ever be major.

The main thing is that we are not editing articles themselves but rather pointing out mistakes in areas, which does not sound very much and therefore minor. We are not changing content (which would be major), but we are giving willful contributors a more obvious opportunity to help.

I am probably not the only person who thinks of that, and we may have our own perspectives as to whether it is "major" or "minor". Let me hear some opinions from you and find out how it really shall be. Gamingforfun 3 6 5 ( talk ) 23:35, 22 January 2016 (UTC)


 * In my opinion, that should indeed be a non-minor edit. A minor edit is not necessarily one that does not change article content. After all, not all talk page or policy page edits are minor. A minor edit is one where it is unlikely that any other editor would disagree with it. Adding or removing a tag that says, for example, that there is a WP:POV problem, would by definition be about a disagreement. Therefore, it should not be considered a minor edit. --Tryptofish (talk) 23:55, 22 January 2016 (UTC)
 * See also Help_talk:Minor_edit/Archive_1. Adrian J. Hunter(talk•contribs) 05:59, 23 January 2016 (UTC)
 * I was actually looking for a reason to keep it and not change it; this helped. Thanks. Gamingforfun 3 6 5 ( talk ) 21:43, 23 January 2016 (UTC)

Why are moves automatically flagged 'minor edits'?
Article moves can be quite contentious. It seems better to have them flagged as major edits, or at least give the moving editor the option to choose whether it is minor or major. Gap9551 (talk) 17:51, 10 February 2016 (UTC)
 * I agree with you, and I remember having discussed this issue at the Village Pump some time ago. It's a software issue, rather than a policy issue, but I think the default for moves should be non-minor. --Tryptofish (talk) 20:28, 10 February 2016 (UTC)

one word change?
Does swapping out one word with another count as minor, when the words are synonyms? I'm changing "engagement" to "fight" in an article and wondering whether to check the box. --Rightfulmongoose (talk) 03:25, 1 June 2016 (UTC)
 * It's a subjective call, and there is no way to generalize the answer. There are lots of cases where switching to a simpler synonym is indeed a minor edit. But there can also be cases where an apparent synonym changes the meaning in a way that changes the point, and editors might disagree strongly about it. You can ask yourself: "would a typical editor at this page feel like the edit could be controversial or needs to be discussed?" If you think "yes" or "maybe", then it is not a minor edit, but if your good-faith opinion is "no, not a problem", then go ahead and mark it minor. --Tryptofish (talk) 16:17, 1 June 2016 (UTC)
 * I don't believe that the type of edit which you describe is covered by the definition in Help:Minor edit, and in the case of I feel that the previous wording is by far the more usual English wording. --David Biddulph (talk) 16:30, 1 June 2016 (UTC)

Semi-protected edit request on 15 July 2016
This page under the heading of Fashion reads:

'''Traditionally, men's dress watches appropriate for informal (business), semi-formal, and formal attire are gold, thin, simple, and plain, but increasingly rugged, complicated, or sports watches are considered by some to be acceptable for such attire. Some dress watches have a cabochon on the crown and many women's dress watches have faceted gemstones on the face, bezel, or bracelet. Some are made entirely of faceted sapphire (corundum).[50]'''

'''This links to "Sapphire Watch Specs PDF" (PDF). richardmille.com. Retrieved 14 April 2012.'''

My name is Robert Moore and I would like to change the following because of this broken link on this page under link [50]:

This is the paragraph which link is broken. I would like to fix this with my link to my site where I have a blog entry about sapphire watches.

The link number above is [50]

You can Title the Link to my page as follows: New $1.28 Million New Watch made of Sapphire

The author is link: http://blingyz.com/watch-womens-mens-sapphire-watches/

where I have an article on sapphire watch. Thank you

Robert9334rm (talk) 02:32, 15 July 2016 (UTC)
 * Red information icon with gradient background.svg Not done: - spam link. -KH-1 (talk) 02:53, 15 July 2016 (UTC)

Semi-protected edit request on 7 September 2016
Proposed replacement

Replace: Section "Things to remember", Text "Neither will certain changes that do not affect the presentation of the page in HTML,"

with: Text "In addition, certain changes will not work if they do not affect the presentation of the page in HTML,"

because: Target text contains grammatical sentence fragment dependent upon previous sentence construction, and impedes flow of intended meaning.

Xiopsis (talk) 01:07, 7 September 2016 (UTC)
 * Yes check.svg Done Topher385 (talk) 01:20, 7 September 2016 (UTC)

What about tense changes (e.g. "product planned for launch" -> "product launched")?
When an article says "X is planned for release in May 2016" and it's now past that date and the product has in fact been released, would changing that to "X was released in May 2016" (if that was actually the case) be a minor edit? Kabutoo (talk) 20:23, 15 November 2016 (UTC)
 * That feels like a major edit to me. Ideally the fact of the release needs a new citation. The previous text, "X is going to be released", might have been backed up by a citation to some pre-release announcement, but that doesn't prove that X actually happened as planned. -- John of Reading (talk) 22:23, 15 November 2016 (UTC)
 * I also agree that that seems like a major edit. Additionally, a citation to support the product's release update would be prudent. – Matthew  - (talk) 20:56, 23 February 2017 (UTC)

Semi-protected edit request on 26 February 2018
Adding of basic punctuation formating. Timotee 123 (talk) 17:19, 26 February 2018 (UTC)
 * You need to say exactly what changes you wish to be made when making a semi-protected edit request. -- SarekOfVulcan (talk) 17:24, 26 February 2018 (UTC)

Need for correction
The house pictured and alleged to be the one Thomas More lived in is not POSSiBLY More’s 16th c. House! This needs to be rewritten. Alfredriggs (talk) 17:44, 16 April 2018 (UTC)
 * The place to discuss that is at Talk:Thomas More, where it would be very appropriate to bring up that issue. Here, however, is for discussing the Minor edit help page. --Tryptofish (talk) 22:24, 16 April 2018 (UTC)

revisiting categorization as a minor edit
Is anyone else interested in revisiting the issue of why we don't consider altering or adding categories a minor edit? I believe that such edits are minor edits, the vast majority of the time—and, as a very common type of minor edit, they really bloat large watchlists. (I realize that Hotcat does not mark them as minor, but this can be changed (again).)

In my opinion we're at a bit of a crisis here in terms of not being able to filter out low-impact edits by editors who make very small changes to very large numbers of articles in rapid succession. Having enlarged my watchlist some time ago, I find it increasingly offputting. My watchlist is largely taken up by a handful of users in one subject area who make continuous low-impact edits without marking them as minor—and categorization edits must be about half of them, at least. Outriggr (talk) 02:30, 19 July 2018 (UTC)
 * From your comment on my talk page today you must think of my edits on categories as low-impact, but you didn't mention categories in your talk-page note. I do consider category edits as non-minor edits. Some people differ on what would fit a category. I've done well in not having category reverts or discussions, but I still don't see them as minor edits because of, seriously, their high impact. Adding a page to a category improves Wikipedia's easily-accessible collection on a particular topic. Categories act as a good reference tool for readers and researchers who use them, and to offer everything available on Wikipedia on their topic-of-interest in an as-complete-as-possible-listing seems a valuable tool for society. Alerting other editors of those changes seems important enough to leave them out of the "minor" realm, because incorrect categorization edits do occur (which then have a high-impact on the accurate public representation of a particular Wikipedia collection). Randy Kryn (talk) 02:57, 19 July 2018 (UTC)


 * I would strongly oppose making category edits minor by default. I realize that some kinds of categorization are simply gnomish edits and could be appropriately marked as minor. But (especially given the flexibility in filtering watchlists) we should not make major/minor distinctions based on how they affect the length of watchlists. The guiding principle is whether or not other editors might disagree with the edit, and there are many kinds of categorization that are highly contentious. Just spend a little time at WP:CfD, and you'll see arguments about how to name or apply a given category, and some such arguments get quite heated. And if one considers WP:BLP, there are lots of ways that applying a category to a BLP page can be a serious policy violation. --Tryptofish (talk) 17:46, 19 July 2018 (UTC)
 * By the way, there is a simple check box on watchlist pages that allows the list to show or not show category changes. --Tryptofish (talk) 17:52, 19 July 2018 (UTC)
 * Well, I stand by my assertion that the "average" category edit is minor; certainly they shouldn't always be marked that way.
 * I believe you're referring to a separate entry in the watchlist filter that shows an article being added to a watched category?--as I see no way to hide borderline-spam such as this from my watchlist (and it's taking up most of my watchlist). Outriggr (talk) 20:54, 19 July 2018 (UTC)
 * It's in your "Preferences" under 'Watchlist' (in the 'Advanced options' section). Randy Kryn (talk) 21:00, 19 July 2018 (UTC)
 * Yes, if you go to that part of the Preferences, you can check "Hide categorization of pages". In addition, on the watchlist screen itself (with all of the new features turned off), there is a line near the top that begins "Hide:", and one of the boxes to check is "page categorization". --Tryptofish (talk) 21:15, 19 July 2018 (UTC)
 * Sounds like a problem thought of and well solved at some point by Wikipedian coders. My hats off to the coders and other well-interested technonauts. Randy Kryn (talk) 03:57, 20 July 2018 (UTC)
 * A vivid example of a category addition being anything but a minor edit just crossed my watchlist, at Talk:Piss Christ. --Tryptofish (talk) 17:11, 23 July 2018 (UTC)

Misnomer
These guidelines for "Minor edit" seem to reflect technology-oriented aspects only. Writing and editing does not focus on formatting (technical aspect, which online has technology basis) but on content. I recommend changes, such as: major content edit, minor content edit, copy edit, layout (change in headers), formatting (e.g., bolding)... — Preceding unsigned comment added by Aboudaqn (talk • contribs) 02:13, 18 September 2018 (UTC)

Sentence in lead
A recent edit by pointed out, quite correctly in my opinion, that there is a problem in the way the opening sentences of this help page are written. Currently, they are:
 * "A check to the minor edit box signifies that only superficial differences exist between the current and previous versions. Examples include typographical corrections, formatting and presentational changes, and rearrangements of text without modification of its content."

The problem is that there are many types of formatting changes and text rearrangements that are not at all minor. Could we word this better? --Tryptofish (talk) 21:25, 26 January 2019 (UTC)


 * Just off the top of my head, how about:
 * "Examples include typographical corrections, corrections of minor formatting errors, and reversion of obvious vandalism."
 * --Tryptofish (talk) 21:28, 26 January 2019 (UTC)
 * Yes, that's better. Thanks. Flyer22 Reborn (talk) 22:55, 27 January 2019 (UTC)
 * Implemented. – Jonesey95 (talk) 08:21, 31 January 2019 (UTC)
 * Great, thanks! --Tryptofish (talk) 22:03, 31 January 2019 (UTC)

Any way to mark an edit as minor on the mobile site?
See title DemonDays64 (talk) 21:11, 12 May 2019 (UTC)

कैथून
कैथून एक कस्बा है। इस क्षेत्र में नगर पालिका लगती है । कैथून में प्रचीन विभीषण मंदिर भी जो लगभग 2000 वर्ष पुराना है । इसे देखने के लिए काफी सँख्या में लोग दूर दूर से आते है। साथ ही यहाँ कोटा डोरिया की साड़िया बनाई जाती है ।  इस आर्टिकल की आप कैथून पेज पर पोस्ट करो । धन्यवाद कमल सुमन Kamalsuman1994 (talk) 18:05, 10 August 2019 (UTC)


 * This is the English Wikipedia, so discussions should be in English. If you are looking for a Wikipedia in another language, there is a list at meta:List of Wikipedias. --David Biddulph (talk) 18:09, 10 August 2019 (UTC)

Is adding a link to a page a minor edit?
E.g. replacing Firearm with Firearm.

Asmageddon (talk) 20:07, 22 December 2019 (UTC)


 * Yes, that would be a minor edit (so long as you are not changing the word within the brackets). --Tryptofish (talk) 22:04, 22 December 2019 (UTC)

Marking as disambiguation page: Minor or major edit?
Self-explanatory. I have the setting to mark disambiguation page links in orange instead of blue. I was just doing some editing assuming that wiki linking this would be direct to the page like normal. The visual editor didn't show as, so when I did show preview in the source editor, orange. So I went to the article to properly mark the page as disambiguation. Now it didn't change how the page looked. Then to mark as minor edit? Well, it's always safe to assume a major. No strict rule on marking minor edits, so would I mark this as minor? Can I Log In (talk) 02:57, 21 February 2020 (UTC)
 * I use the gadget "Display links to disambiguation pages in orange" but cannot follow your explanation of what you thought was wrong, maybe because I don't use VisualEditor. Daniel Sullivan already had hndis which automatically adds  so I reverted your edit.[//en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Daniel_Sullivan&diff=prev&oldid=941868838] The link is still orange for me. I don't think addition of magic words like   should be marked as minor. In my experience, including your example, such additions are often wrong and should be reverted. Another example is improper addition to set index articles which are not disambiguation pages although some users think it. Minor edit is for edits "that no editor would be expected to regard as disputable". PrimeHunter (talk) 04:26, 21 February 2020 (UTC)
 * Using the orange link disambiguation gadget, all of those links should be orange. I was editing in the visual editor, and one of the disambiguation link was not orange.

On topic of minor edits, so regarding these types of edits, we just don't mark as minor? Can I Log In (talk) 04:44, 21 February 2020 (UTC)
 * As a DABfixer, I find the orange markup invaluable. I have seen an extremely rare glitch, where redirects to DAB pages show blue; but it's of negligible importance.
 * I never mark recategorisations as minor. That includes things like adding e.g. "geo" or "surname" parameters to a dab tag. The only edits on DAB pages which I mark as minor are things like blatant typos; and sorting, adding TOC right, adding or editing headings, and removing pipes per WP:DABPIPE, which change the way information is presented but do not change its content. If I change something, e.g. a date, to agree with the article, I do not mark that as minor.
 * Every manual addition of the magic word  which I have seen has been wrong. Narky Blert (talk) 08:27, 21 February 2020 (UTC)

Semi-protected edit request on 14 March 2020
Probiotics can be a potential therapeutic agent used to reduce coronavirus infection by production of IgA and IgG which improves immunity Suyash.kathade9 (talk) 20:55, 14 March 2020 (UTC)
 * Red information icon with gradient background.svg Not done: this is the talk page for discussing improvements to the page Help:Minor edit. Please make your request at the talk page for the article concerned.  JTP (talk • contribs) 21:16, 14 March 2020 (UTC)

A quick question I don't see stated on this page
When I add a short description to an article, should it be classified as minor? Prana1111 (talk) 19:05, 17 March 2020 (UTC)
 * It's a substantive change that other contributors may wish to review and could even disagree with. So please don't mark such an edit as minor. Adrian J. Hunter(talk•contribs) 23:57, 17 March 2020 (UTC)
 * Yes, it may be controversial. So it can't possibly be minor. Don't mark it that way. -◊ PRAHLAD Balaji 09:57, 22 April 2020 (UTC)

The m
Did they mention the m in any edits above the ..(major edit) -Cupper52 (talk) 14:22, 17 August 2020 (UTC)

What are minor edits for?
I've been mulling something over for a while. I'm not sure where I should formally bring it up, but I thought I'd ask here to get a few views on what I think.

When was the last time an edit being minor helped you - for example, because you didn't review it because it was marked minor by an editor you trust not to misuse the facility? I cannot even bring the last time to mind.

When was the last time you saw misuse of the facility? For me, it's today - and today is not a special day. Some people use it randomly, some people use it all the time.

In view of this, I'm wondering why it exists. Pinkbeast (talk) 19:33, 12 April 2019 (UTC)


 * I disregard whether an edit is marked as minor when reviewing my watchlist as the feature is so frequently misused. I can't remember a time it's ever helped me. Adrian J. Hunter(talk•contribs) 01:06, 13 April 2019 (UTC)
 * The minor edit feature is fairly useless in my opinion. Many people unknowingly mark major edits as minor, based on their own opinion of what constitutes "minor" rather than the agreed criteria. It is also easy to forget to tick the minor edit box, so many minor edits will not be marked as such. There are also other non-minor edits I would like to ignore, for example the edit history of sports pages tend to be flooded with "plus one" edits where someone plays one more game or scores one more goal and their stats are updated accordingly. I would scrap the minor edit system and try to improve the revision history metadata. For example, if you add 5,000 characters to an article and remove 5,001, the revision history shows "-1", which is clearly not indicative of the magnitude of the change. --Jameboy (talk) 12:53, 13 October 2020 (UTC)

Changing image
Was it to possible to change image with minor? e.g C# fanart logo replaced by Official C# logo from Microsoft. Flankbed (talk) 08:40, 3 November 2020 (UTC)

Semi-protected edit request on 3 February 2021
Please add a full stop to the end of the first bulletpoint in the "What to mark as minor changes". RainbowTaIes (talk) 14:41, 3 February 2021 (UTC)
 * According to MOS:BULLETLIST, in bulleted lists such as this one, "No terminal punctuation is used with sentence fragments" -- John of Reading (talk) 15:54, 3 February 2021 (UTC)

Bullet point 4 on "What to mark as minor changes" is incorrectly using the word "was".
It should be using "were" as "The Pyramids" is a plural noun. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 86.135.64.19 (talk) 03:20, 23 February 2021 (UTC)
 * Thank you for spotting this. -- John of Reading (talk) 07:52, 23 February 2021 (UTC)

mea culpa: I've been doing it wrong — but so it goes

 * Note: This developed into a small personal essay on the theme of policy: can't live with it, can't live without it. If that's not your bag, feel free to ignore the hell out of my further remarks.

I've been using "minor" for many edits where I consider controversy to be extremely unlikely, but not impossible.

Recently I change a link target from: to: where clearly 'physics' was too broad (this is close to a recent edit, but not exact).
 * In physics, quantum vacuum state is a fancy concept about not very much ...
 * In quantum field theory, quantum vacuum state is a fancy concept about not very much ...

Quite a number of my edits concern what I think of as "scoping" links in the article lead text, many of which do not resolve as precisely as one might like.

I suppose I'm applying the golden rule, because I think to myself: if[added] I was prickly about this article, is this edit a good use of my attention? Even prickly pears have attentional constraints, although maybe we should entirely eschew the use of "minor" all the better to wear them down :-)

Another thing I'm doing is flagging a substantive edit as "major" but then clicking "minor" for fiddling with my most recent changes, especially if the article is stale (coming on my tracks) and not much time has elapsed (it's usually under about five minutes).

These are articles where any editor showing up at all might only be a weekly or monthly event, and I have trouble wrapping my mind around making the first edit "major" followed by a slew of belated proof-reading of my own work, also uniformly marked as "major". Is that really useful? Or is this guidance here too nakedly controversialist in attitude?

Even after reading this guidance, I think marking the major contribution as "major" and a flurry of minor buffing shortly thereafter as "minor" is the better route.

On more heavily edited articles, or more controversial subjects, I've absolutely used "major" for tweaking a single word to a nearby synonym.

My user name is "MaxEnt" for a reason. It's short for maximum entropy, which is a concept from information theory.

You've got one bit to signal the best use of attentional resources.

I think one big puff of smoke from a dormant, obscure article which hasn't received any substantial love for a month or a year suffices to alert the natives in the valley below. In that context, out of a flurry of edits, if the major swings of the axe are all marked "minor" and a few clean-up whittles are marked "minor" the available bit is earning its livelihood.

In a context where editing is highly contentious, the bit best earns its livelihood when used precisely as documented here — because in the collective editing context, your edits are few among many.

I happen to have a small animus to the random overuse of capitalization. Often this is merely lazy. Sometimes it's a side effect of Wikipedia defaulting to proper page titles, even for subject which are clearly not proper terms. Editors will less experience seem to treat this as a cultural signal: when in doubt, capitalize like the natives who run the place, as gleaned from page title conventions.

These days people who mainly exist on social media seem to think that a few extra capitals sprinkled at random signify the fresh piney scent of big-boy pants. Capitalization as aromatherapy just about makes my head explode.

Along the spectrum of capitalization, there are many, many grey areas. Some of those grey areas are not all that grey, but it's not impossible some heirloom cultivar of prickly pear might object to changing things. I suspect I apply the 80–20 rule to my mental construct of prickly-pearness: am I clicking "minor" on 20% of the arguable edge-cases to get 80% of the useful effect?

From my background in information theory, if you're going to make good use out of a 1-bit language, you have to be of flexible mind, and take into account the background signal in the article's specific context.

But perhaps my nuance has been in the pickle jar for too long (fifteen years of hanging around) and as such is not suitable for written policy.

I would say about 80% of my edits are intended mainly to boost the signal from dress code: it's good for the long term viability of Wikipedia that most articles look like they've been edited within the last decade (no few have a last substantive edit dating back to 2007, that golden era where half of all edits were supplied by relative neophytes, soon to take one good hard at the crash of 2008, quickly assessing that further involvement with Wikipedia was not their A-list).

Then there's the quantum barrier. Some pages have obvious defects, but there's no simple, self-evidently non-controversial edit to push the article back onto a better track. My aging spider sense tells me that many editors try to stay far away from "owning" a quick fix. It's shocking what kind of conspicuous garbage can survive in an article that has fallen into a quantum rut.

I fancy myself having put on the miles over a very long span of time to wade in and sever the Gordion knot with a butcher knife. It's often possible to change one problem that nobody wants to touch for years and years into three equally large problems which will actually manage to attract the right kind of TLC in short order.

By one metric, the article has moved backwards (you've substituted one conspicuous problem for three problems, equally conspicuous). By another metric (barrier to participation), the article is now moving along in the right direction again.

The next editor who comes along might choose to jump onto "right direction again" or might choose to jump onto "moved backwards". There's no predicting this. So I accept that a fair percentage of my "Gordian" whacks will be reverted in short order. If half of them live to see the next morning, it's still a valuable contribution as I see things.

My problem with social engagement is that I'm editing Wikipedia while I'm also living my private research life. Because I also do so much editing in my own wiki, most of my edits are almost autonomic. It's takes away some time from my day to constantly groom Wikipedia, but not too much attentional resource. But as soon as I get involved in social discussion of my attempted contributions, attentional resources are commandeered in a big hurry. Now it's time (okay) plus something I really can't afford (distraction from my life mission).

It's legendary in software development how mistaken we can be about what our users actually do out there. And this is no different on Wikipedia. As a defined community, we tell ourselves certain stories about how this whole thing works, and these stories are largely what they need to be, but they fall rather short of being the truth on the ground. I earnestly believe that my contributions are more valuable because I judiciously ignore much of the official policy around the edges. Anyone can go through my edit history and say that half of my edits fell short of the desired norms—as if to imply I fell short only for lack of the right psychological mindset.

But I can look at this and compute a specific cost function. The extra ten minutes fussing here would have precluded ten other small edits somewhere else. A good exchange or a bad exchange? It's one of the deepest themes in all of economics: how freely we expend resources when we perceive those resources as coming out of any other person's wallet.

On the other side of the coin, central policy can't go around instructing newbies to consider their actions in terms of detailed cost models for every other creature they might encounter in the ecosystem.

All the same, it's a bit sad to see official policy on the "minor" edit flag thoroughly tilted toward adjudicating rage wars. I'm at the stage in life where I can instantly imagine just about every way an apparently "small" edit can trigger someone else to have what we used to call "a hairy big one". (Before the advent of the smartphone camera, we could happily presume a shaggy aggravated sasquatch was lurking behind the nearest wide tree at all times, so the phrase had a good implicit cover story to its anatomical subtext.)

That said, not all hairy big ones are created equal, and it will be a long road to talk me down from stubbornly persisting in filtering the guidance here through a long-established perspective on the precise whereabouts of the 80–20 sweet spot. &mdash; MaxEnt 15:02, 24 November 2021 (UTC)

Marking articles as stubs
Should marking an existing article as a stub count as a minor edit? Saint1997 (talk) 14:02, 30 November 2020 (UTC)


 * No, not at all, since doing that changes the assessment of the page. CactiStaccingCrane (talk) 08:59, 21 December 2021 (UTC)