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 | This is an information page. It is not an encyclopedic article, nor one of Wikipedia's policies or guidelines; rather, its purpose is to explain certain aspects of Wikipedia's norms, customs, technicalities, or practices. It may reflect differing levels of consensus and vetting. |
 | This page in a nutshell: Checking the minor edit box is only for superficial changes that are unlikely to be disputed, such as typographical corrections. Any edit that alters the meaning of an article, even slightly, is not minor. |
A check to the minor edit box signifies that only superficial differences exist between the current and previous versions. Examples include typographical corrections, corrections of minor formatting errors, and reversion of obvious vandalism. A minor edit requires no review and could never be the subject of a dispute. An edit of this kind is marked in its page's revision history with a lowercase, bolded "m" character (m).
By contrast, all concerned editors should review a major edit for its acceptability. Any change affecting an article's meaning is not minor, even if it concerns a single word.
Because editors may choose to ignore minor edits when reviewing recent changes, the distinction between major and minor edits is significant. Logged-in users can set their preferences not to display minor edits. If there is any chance that another editor might dispute a change, the edit should not be marked as minor. (If an editor considers a change to be minor yet conceivably controversial, one option is to include the word "minor" in the edit summary without ticking the "minor edit" box.)
Users who are not logged in to Wikipedia or are in mobile mode are not permitted to mark changes as minor because of the potential for vandalism.[a] The ability to mark changes as minor is among the many reasons to create and use an account on Wikipedia to edit.
A good rule of thumb is that only edits consisting solely of spelling corrections, formatting changes, or rearrangement of text without modification of the content may be flagged as minor edits.
It's acceptable to never mark a single edit as "minor". If other editors complain about your use of the "minor" edit flag, then it's likely a good idea to stop using it.
How to mark an edit as minor
Below the edit summary field, there is a checkbox that says, "This is a minor edit". Most browsers support access keys (keyboard shortcuts); the access key for the minor edit checkbox is i. You can mark and save an edit quickly by using the access keys for minor edit (i) and save (s).
When filling in the edit summary, you may also press Tab ?, Space to check the minor edit box quickly.
What to mark as minor changes
- Spelling, grammatical, and punctuation corrections, for example "Condoleeza Rice" to "Condoleezza Rice"
- Simple formatting (e.g., capitalization, or properly adding italics to non-English words, like folie des grandeurs, or titles of certain works, like The Adventures of Tom Sawyer)
- Formatting that does not change the meaning of the page (e.g., moving a picture, splitting one paragraph into two—where this is not contentious)
- Fixing layout errors
- Adding or correcting wikilinks, or fixing broken external links and references already present in the article
- Removing obvious vandalism
What not to mark as minor changes
- Adding or removing content in an article
- Adding or removing visible tags or other templates in an article
- Adding or removing references/citations, external links, or categories in an article
- Adding comments to a talk page or other discussion
Things to remember
- Marking a major change as a minor one is considered poor etiquette, especially if the change involves the deletion of some text.
- Consequently, if you are in doubt about whether an edit is minor or not, it is always safer not to mark it as minor.
- Reverting a substantive edit is not likely to be considered minor under most circumstances. If the status of a page is disputed – particularly if an edit war may be imminent – then it is better not to mark any edit as minor. Reverting blatant vandalism or an obvious typographical error is an exception to this rule.
- If you accidentally mark an edit as minor when it was, in fact, a major edit, you should make a second edit, or dummy edit, to supplement your first edit. Simply note in the edit summary of your second edit that the previous edit was major, don't mark the edit as minor, and save your change. When saved, your dummy edit will be logged as a revision change in the page's edit history and listed immediately above your original edit. Just opening the edit box and saving (i.e., changing nothing) will not work. In addition, certain changes will not work if they do not affect the presentation of the page in HTML, such as adding a blank space at the end of a line or a blank line at the end of the page; in these cases, the edit is canceled and the edit summary discarded. However, one can, for example, add an extra space between two words. This will be preserved in the wikitext and recorded as a change, although it will not change the page's appearance when rendered.
- It may be worth communicating any disagreement about what is minor via Talk or a message to the contributor, being careful to avoid a flame war. There is a grey area, and many contributors will appreciate feedback on whether they have got it right.
- Marking your change as minor affects how it displays in some editors' watchlists. If, for example, you mark your talk page comments as "minor", then fewer editors are likely to notice your comment.
- The designation of a change as minor or major is not a reflection of how much work went into making the change. For instance, even if you spent several hours finding and resolving problems with the formatting of references, the change would still be called minor. Editors should not feel that marking a change as minor devalues their effort.
- The use of this feature is optional.
Exceptions
Administrators and rollbackers can semi-automatically revert the edits of the last editor of a page; all such rollback reversions are marked as minor by the wiki software. The intended use of the rollback feature is for cases of vandalism, where the act of reverting any vandalism should be considered minor (and can be ignored in the recent changes list). Moving or protecting a page appear as minor edits in a page's history in addition to being recorded in the Move and Protection logs respectively. Also, Wikidata edits are always marked as minor on Wikipedia for users that choose to display them in their watchlist/recent changes.
Additionally, bot accounts usually mark their edits as minor in addition to the "bot" flag.
See also
- Help:Editing—How to edit a page
- WP:NULLEDIT
- Help:Related changes—List related changes
- {{Uw-minor}}—User warning for improper use of the minor edit box
Notes
- ^ Minor edits were disabled for logged-out users in January 2003 after a discussion about bot edits and RecentChanges.