MinorEdit

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MinorEdit is a feature of some wikis that allows you to mark a change as not significant, on the levels of typo corrections, and thus should not make an entry (by default) on RecentChanges. It's typically implemented on the EditText? page as a checkbox that reads "This change is a minor edit." It is complementary to the DigestedSummary.

The intent of the MinorEdit feature is to hide a page from the default inexperienced users. Those few who really want to view every spelling correction or other small change can still do so. People's attention should not be wasted by hunting for trivial changes. A few people will read all changes, although editors should feel very free to make minor improvements to spelling, formatting, and categorization.

EditCategories are a generalization of MinorEdits, and have replaced them here on MeatballWiki.

Should MinorEdits be hidden by default on RecentChanges?

Pros:

Most people aren't interested in editing other people's work.
Editors should feel very free to make minor improvements to spelling, formatting, and categorization.

Cons:

This makes PeerReview harder because MinorEdits will be ignored by most.

There is tension between two ideas: benefit for reader versus benefit for the system. Allowing readers to filter out changes they are not interested in is good for the reader.

Seems to me the eventual consensus was that hiding MinorEdits by default is good?

I put an all changes link on RecentChanges. Click on it once in a while. -- SunirShah

Marking major edits as minor edits

The MinorEdit feature solves the problem that minor corrections that do not alter meaning (typos, layout, adding categories) sometimes tend towards HijackingRecentChanges. Marking such edits as "minor" goes a far way towards making RecentChanges contain the "real news".

This useful feature creates a new problem. There are rare users that tend to edit pages, add substantial contributions or even refactor pages or delete pages and mark this as "minor edit" and hide such actions from PeerReview.

There are situation where this may be acceptable:

when content is moved, the old page deleted as "minor edit" and only the target page edit is made visible as "major edit".
...

In general the practice is unfair because:

it may hide the edit completely and hinder PeerReview
it may temporarily establish a biased POV that remains unchallenged for a while
it reduces the visible activity on the wiki (less visible traffic)
it reduces the chance for a senseful discussion of the topic
it increases the workload for other users
...

But. Typically some member will check the minor edits and make the "minor edit" and this practice visible and discuss it. So it should be rare that someone really gets away with it.

Therefore. MarkingMajorEditsAsMinorEdits? is neither good style nor does it the poster any good (he gets into discussions about fairness, loses trust).

Possible solutions:

personal discussions with the contributor in question
temporarily turn off "minor edit" (e. g. for a month)
hard security: wiki software can automatically change "minor edit" to "major edit" if it is abled to recognize the difference (e. g. from a diff evaluation). My experience once was that this creates some emotions among users. -- HelmutLeitner

StyleGuide

Alternatively, what do you think about the idea of instead marking that your change is MajorEdit?? or MyLastEdit?? Or allow both Minor and Major edit. -- ChristopherAllen

Another idea, is to programatically determine if something is a MinorEdit. There are a couple of ways to do this, one is to just size the diff. Twiki I think merges changes of multiple, sequential edits by the same user in a small amount of time into a single revision. -- ChristopherAllen

: On the other hand, grabbing diffs is problematic because the algorithm might mark minor edits as major due to, say, the addition of some whitespace at the top of a page. - NatalieBrown

I don't think it's a big problem if you get an occasional minor edit displayed in the RecentChanges, as long as most of them get filtered away. I came up with a simpler solution that lets you handle the common case of people editing the same page multiple times: if the last edit was within several hours and was by the same author, just treat it as minor. In addition, the decision on whether the change is minor or minor is not performed when you save the page -- instead it's done each time the history is displayed. This way you have more information and you can look for common patterns of uninteresting changes, changing the status of some edits. -- RadomirDopieralski

CategoryWikiTechnology CategoryRecentChanges

MinorEdit

Should MinorEdits be hidden by default on RecentChanges?

Marking major edits as minor edits

Discussion