User:Anomie/Sandbox2

This is a draft of a possible change to WP:COSMETICBOT. While I think it accurately summarizes existing consensus, the claimed "broad agreement" would be tested by it actually passing an RFC.

Cosmetic changes

Cosmetic changes to the wikitext are sometimes the most controversial, either in themselves or because they clutter page histories, watchlists, and/or the recent changes feed with edits that are not worth the reviewing time spent. Such changes should not usually be done on their own, but may be allowed in an edit that also includes a substantive change.

Changes that are typically considered substantive affect something visible to readers and consumers of Wikipedia, such as

• the output text or HTML in ways that make a difference to the audio or visual rendering of a page in web browsers, screen readers, when printed, in PDFs, or when accessed through other forms of assistive technology (e.g. removing a deleted category, updating a template parameter, changing whitespace in bulleted vertical lists);
• the "user-facing interfaces" of Wikipedia, such as category listing or on-wiki and external search engine results (e.g. changing category sort keys, noindexing, search engine summaries/snippets, or page images);
• the "administration of the encyclopedia", such as the maintenance of hidden categories used to track maintenance backlogs (e.g. changing {{citation needed}} to {{citation needed|date=September 2016}}); or
• egregiously invalid HTML such as unclosed tags, even if it doesn't affect browsers' display or is fixed before output by HTML Tidy (e.g. changing <sup>...</sub> to <sup>...</sup>)

while changes that do not are typically considered cosmetic. Minor edits are not usually considered cosmetic but still need consensus to be done by bots.

Consensus can, as always, create exceptions for particular cosmetic edits. For example, the community frequently determines that a particular template should be substituted so it can be deleted, even though the substitution does not change the output of the page. Consensus for a bot to make any particular cosmetic change must be formalized in an approved request for approval.

While this policy applies only to bots, human editors may also wish to follow this guidance for the reasons given here, especially if making such changes on large scales. Keep in mind that reverting a cosmetic edit is also a cosmetic edit. If the changes made in a cosmetic edit would otherwise be acceptable as part of a substantive edit, there is no reason to revert them. Report the issue to the bot operator instead.