Wikipedia:Avoid using preview button

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

This page is intended as humor. It is not, nor will it ever be, a Wikipedia policy or guideline. It illustrates standards or conduct that are generally not accepted by the Wikipedia community.

Shortcut: WP:AUPB

This page is created as a humorous complement to Wikipedia:Avoid using wikilinks.

Preview button (shown on the right) is sometimes incorrectly used to preview articles before actually saving them. It is wrong and incorrect for several reasons:

1. If your computer crashes, all the work will be lost.
2. You won't have as many edits, and therefore, you are less likely to become an administrator of Wikipedia.
3. Servers cannot handle the load of generating pages that do not even exist yet.
4. If your typo causes a link to go red, that will cause people to realise that they should probably create a redirect to the real page, since if you have misspelled it, so might somebody else.
5. All that time spent will result in you getting an edit conflict, causing work lost and further headache

[edit] Alternatives

• Parse all the text in your head, if you would like to see how it would look like.
• Save the page (marking the edit minor). If the outcome is undesirable, edit again. If you like it, edit again, making a small change and apologising for marking a major edit as minor.
• Make a private sandbox.

[edit] See also

• Wikipedia:Avoid using wikilinks
• Wikipedia:Wikis considered harmful