Help:Automatic edit summaries
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Automatic edit summaries are created by the MediaWiki software for certain actions. These summaries appear in recent changes, page histories, and contributions lists, unless you provide your own edit summary.
Auto edit summaries exist for five different actions, if the user fails to provide an edit summary:
- Blanking a page
- Replacing entire page with other text
- Creating a new page (the first 200 characters of the article appear in the summary)
- Creating a redirect
- Reverting a revision
Also, when you use section editing, the section title will appear in the edit summary box in light grey text between comment tags, and used as your summary unless you alter or replace it.
Typing the summary is unimportant when a user creates a new page; leaving the summary area blank, the edit summary in this case is automatically set to "Created page with ", followed by about 160 characters of the entered wikitext (the maximum summary length), with a trailing ellipsis.
If the summary describes a redirect or replacement of the content with a {{copyvio}} template, this most likely means that an editor allowed the software to generate the summary out of convenience. If the listed target or replacement text is reasonable, no further action is required.
A summary indicative of an inappropriate edit (such as the blanking or replacement of legitimate content) is probably not a deliberate description on the part of the user (who might not even have realized that he/she was harming Wikipedia).
What to do
If vandalism (or a well-meaning test requiring reversion) is suspected, please examine the edit to determine its nature and respond accordingly. Remember to assume good faith in the absence of evidence to the contrary. Keep in mind that the edit summary was not typed by the user, so it should not be interpreted as such evidence.
When an anonymous editor blanks all or part of a biography of a living person, it is important to remember that this may be an attempt by the subject of the article to remove problematic material. If this appears to be the case then such an edit should not be treated as vandalism. Instead, the editor should be welcomed and invited to explain his/her concerns with the article.
See also
- Feature description at Meta-Wiki
- Undo and rollback, reverting tools that pre-fill the edit summary