User:Nfutvol/TalkArchive

Preview and edit summaries
Thanks for doing hard work on articles like 118th Airlift Wing, which I came across today while working through the backlog of copyright problems. I noticed a couple of things, and I'd like to ask you to change your editing style just a bit.

First, could you please use the Show preview button before saving your edits? I ask because frequent saving makes our job as admins much more difficult – it clutters the recent changes feed for the vandalism watchdogs and slows the servers down _tremendously_. 'Show preview' keeps the changes in your browser before a actual data transfer to the Wikimedia servers in Florida. By saving small changes over and over, the servers have to work harder, which makes everyone's Wikilife slower. On large articles, like George Washington, this editing style can _really_ slow things down because the entire 72KB has to be sent back and forth for each edit. (Have you ever seen the 'changes older than X seconds may not be displayed' or the 'the database is locked for maintenance' banners? There you go.)

More importantly, anyone examining the article closely (like me and other admins) has to click on diff after diff to find where a particular change was made. The page history for 118th Airlift Wing is a good example; at one point, there were 6 edits made in only 2 minutes, changes that could have been made in only one saved edit to the article itself. I hope you can see how difficult it could be for someone to find a needle in this haystack. Believe it or not, thousands of people will come behind you to examine that page history and even more are looking at the recent changes log. The page histories are crucial for resolving disputes with other editors over content and/or behavior.

Second, it would help other editors tremendously if you would go to your user preferences, under the 'Editing' tab, and check the box that says 'Prompt me when entering a blank edit summary'. Edit summaries are not only very important, they're just good etiquette. Again, picture that needle-in-a-haystack searcher who is looking for one particular change. By enabling the preference to remind you to enter an edit summary, you'll get in the habit. An edit summary doesn't have to be very long – sometimes I'll just give one word, like 'wikify'. At other times, my edit summary is longer than the changes I made to the article. Of the 66 edits in the page history of 118th Airlift Wing, only 8 edit summaries have been given. I don't want to come across as Miss Smarty-pants Admin, but that's really unacceptable.

Thanks again for your hard work – it's greatly appreciated, and I'm sure I'll see you around soon. If you have questions or need help, admin-related or not, just leave a message on my talk page. [P.S. I used show preview 11 times while writing this message. :-)] - Krakatoa  Katie  06:19, 14 October 2007 (UTC)