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Community Wishlist Survey 2022/Bots and gadgets/Edit summary assistant

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Edit summary assistant

  • Problem: Regarding edit summaries, many edits do not include them, some editors do not leave them with their edits, and many summaries that are left are less helpful than is possible, often lacking links to supporting information, and being written in a wide range of varied styles.
  • Proposed solution: It would be useful to have means easily available while using edit windows, maybe via drop down menu, maybe from the "Edit summary" field, to help editors to leave helpful standardized edit summaries. Such a capacity could save time and improve quality. I have compiled a page of edit summaries which can provide an initial source of standardized summaries. That page is linked in my User page, in the section titled "Edit summaries". Feel free to copy anything on that page and edit it elsewhere in any way desired, but please do not edit that page. Thank you.
  • Who would benefit: All editors, even the most expert.
  • More comments:
  • Phabricator tickets:
  • Proposer: Jerryobject (talk) 09:55, 22 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Discussion

Convenience link to the page mentioned in the description: w:User:Jerryobject/Edit summaries.

I think it would be useful to have a few standardised edit summaries available, translated into different languages. I only speak English but there's quite a lot of small maintenance tasks on other wikis that are actually easy to perform without much knowledge of a language (other than wikitext). However what always puts me off is not knowing what to put in the edit summary. the wub "?!" 16:48, 23 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]

This is w:Wikipedia:Canned edit summaries. It could be useful, but there are concerns it'd help facilitate vandalism, so it's necessary to tread cautiously. {{u|Sdkb}}talk 19:00, 28 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]
We actually have something like this on pl.wiki almost since forever :pl:MediaWiki:Gadget-edit-summaries.js. There aren't as many as on the above list. I'm not sure if such a long list could be done in a useful way. We have a short and pretty universal list with buttons divded into groups (about 30 buttons). You can see it in action as green buttons: example edit in Polish (buttons are only shown in Polish).
Note that users can add their own summary-buttons in their vector.js or common.js (just a simple function call). The script kind of works in VE even, layout is not perfect, but it mostly works. Nux (talk) 13:05, 30 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]
Many projects have a variation of this, but standardising them into a single tool (not necessarily enabled by default) seems helpful. ~~~~
User:1234qwer1234qwer4 (talk)
22:22, 7 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]
Predictive typing may be nicest solution: a drop-down takes 1 click,which requires additional user attention, but getting the right item by typing a couple first characters may make it super-fast (or at least faster than typing out or clicking around). It could a drop-down that filters itself as you type. Cryout (talk) 14:55, 11 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Voting