User talk:Pid1

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Latest comment: 26 July 2015 by Pid1 in topic section edits
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section edits

Hi, first of all, you are very verbose describing the intent of your edits in the edit summaries. That's great, thank you! I have one general suggestion though. When I saw your recent edits I realized the edit summaries never include the subsection you are editing. The subsection gets added to the edit summary automatically once you use the "edit" link next to the subsection header. Since you probably do not delete the automatic text systematically from the edit summary this means you probably use the "edit" button top of the article. The benefit of editing the subsection instead of the whole article is threefold:

  1. As said above, in article history the edit summary includes the subsection automatically. This is helpful for others looking at article history or patrolling recent changes. the summary even starts with an clickable right-arrow which links directly to the subsection relevant to the edit (e.g.[1]; you can click the arrow. Then go to the next edit to see its missing in yours).
  2. When you use the top edit button for the whole article, chances for edit conflicts are much higher. The risk of an edit conflict is pretty high for a long article as the Beginners Guide. For example someone might start to edit another subsection of the Beginners' Guide at the same time you do your "top level edit". You commit your edit and the other editor will be locked in this case (read-only view of the conflicting edit commit with no highlighting; difficult to transfer/redo), because there is a newer revision when s/he is ready to save (although your edit did not touch the other section).
  3. As a minor benefit, editing per subsection incurs less scrolling. Yes, sometimes you need to see more of the surrounding text to do the edit. What I usually do is open the article in read-mode in one tab, jump to the relevant subsection and edit that in another tab, being free to scroll around in the read-mode tab.

Most do use the "top article edit button" only to move (cut/paste) content from one section to another. Have a try at editing per subsection, I would guess you will find it is more efficient anyway. And if my guess was wrong and you indeed do delete the automatic text to have more space for your edit summary. Ah well, I wrote too much then :) Cheers, --Indigo (talk) 23:46, 25 July 2015 (UTC)Reply[reply]

Thank you for the recommendations! My first few edits were "whole page" because they involved section-to-section moves, but I got in the (bad) habit of using the whole page edit. I realized recently that the per-sections were, as you pointed out, easier to handle. However, I did not realize that the subsection tag that gets added to the summary is useful. Sorry about that! I will make sure to retain those in the future. Pid1 (talk) 00:09, 26 July 2015 (UTC)Reply[reply]
Thanks for the swift and positive response! (see the edit summary of this reply for an example of what Kynikos means below) --Indigo (talk) 12:41, 26 July 2015 (UTC)Reply[reply]

I don't think there's the need to open a new section for this, but, while joining Indigo at recognizing the very good quality of your contributions, I thought you'd also be interested in knowing that edit summaries have a (limited) support for wiki syntax, and for example you can use [[internal link]]s like in the articles text area, which makes it even easier to reference other articles#sections or discussions. When you show the preview or the diff with the dedicated button, you will also be presented with a preview of the edit summary, so you can understand what works and what doesn't. — Kynikos (talk) 03:38, 26 July 2015 (UTC)Reply[reply]

Ah, neat! That is very useful. Thank you! Pid1 (talk) 12:45, 26 July 2015 (UTC)Reply[reply]