User talk:Archeus
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Well done on spotting the vandalism on Pat Kenny. I've reverted back to the most recent unvandalised version. It is nice to see another serious contributor joining. Welcome. FearÉIREANN
\(caint) 19:33, 10 May 2006 (UTC)
[edit] Edit summaries
At the risk of annoying you with nitpickiness, I'd like to ask that you consider the audience of your edit summaries when you write them. Looking back over the edit history of Steorn, the summary "See Discussion" says nothing meaningful to the reader. In fact, it forces them to hunt for your discussion posting purely by username and date, rather than topic. Speaking as both a frequent editor and history reviewer, I'd suggest something more like "rm peswiki link (see 'Research' discussion)" to help article edit reviews. Thank you for listening (and for your patience with me!). ~ Jeff Q (talk) 18:14, 21 August 2006 (UTC)
- Point taken however my Discussion edit happened a couple of seconds after the actual edit so determining what the comment related to is very easy to find. You just go to the discussion history. Its how I read everyone elses comments, I don't go trolling through the whole page. --Archeus 05:49, 22 August 2006 (UTC)
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- You are looking at this situation from a newcomer's perspective, from a very specific moment in time, from a very specific point of view. Yes, it's not particularly difficult to do one cross-checking between an article and its talk page. But you're assuming that one has a reason to want to look at your edit. Six months from now, when Sue Editor is trying to find out what happened to the peswiki link, she'll be confronted with a binary search on a thousand versions of this heavily edited article because whoever changed it didn't mention "peswiki" in the summary. (This is only one of many different scenarios I can conjure up from my own daily editing experience.) The phrase "See discussion", from this perspective, is virtually useless, whereas my suggestion is useful now and later, whether Sue is looking for your edits, peswiki edits, or edits related to the "Research" discussion (which may go on for months, and may have many embedded side-discussions that make the chronological flow hard to read).
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- Of course, in this case, our poor Sue is "lucky". Someone did mention this change on the talk page. (That's not true of maybe 98% of edits, and she can't deduce your edit is in the 2% because she has no way to know this edit is connected to her mission.) She may eventually check the talk page, despite the near-certainty that the link's disappearance was not commented on. But even if she does think to check, maybe that won't work easily because this controversial article now has, say, 3 archives of its very heated discussion over the past half year. If she's really committed (unlike many editors, who will have given up by this time), she may sift through all the archive pages and eventually find the clues that lead her to someone named "Archeus", and then she can cross-check to find the actual edit. But now she's spent 3 minutes instead of the 10 seconds it should have taken to spot a well-summarized edit. If she's like me, making 100+ edits a day, this is a lot of wasted time for a single edit check.
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- This is why meaningful edit summaries are important. Many new editors (and a good number of old hands as well) don't seem to think about the fact that these content changes and discussions stay around forever. Many experienced editors use the old material to avoid covering old ground, to cite earlier consensuses, and many other routine Wikipedia tasks. All I'm asking is a tiny additional effort when you edit. And it's not an off-the-wall request; meaningful summaries are specifically urged in Wikipedia:Edit summaries. Please consider the larger view. After all, someday you'll be an experienced Wikipedian, and may find yourself spending time explaining the reasons behind policies to newbies, to convince them to help their fellow Wikipedians get more work done more quickly and efficiently. ☺ Thank you for listening. ~ Jeff Q (talk) 08:24, 22 August 2006 (UTC)
[edit] Orphaned fair use image (Image:Sean4 small.jpg)
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