[Wikipedia-l] Re: [Wikitech-l] Anons can no longer make minor edits

Sun Jan 5 13:55:48 UTC 2003

At 12:00 05/01/2003 +0000, Jonathan Walther wrote:
> >It might well be "a win from a usability point of view" inasmuch as one=20
> >doesn't have to click on a pesky check box if one's edit is minor, but thi=
>s=20
> >is surely outweighed by the fact that those "M"s on Recent Changes would=
>=20
> >all become unreliable (instead of just some of them being unreliable).
>
>I'm not sure you understand.  The M flag on Recent Changes is unreliable
>RIGHT NOW.  What is a minor fix to one person may be a major point of
>theology to the next person.  One persons raftload of spelling fixes may
>be minor to one person, but important to another.  Since the Minor flag
>is essentially meaningless, we wouldn't notice any difference if it just
>went away altogether.

No, I understand - the current system isn't perfect. That's because people 
aren't perfect. But I trust people to decide what is minor and what isn't 
more than I trust a computer to do it, particularly as the computer is only 
going to be counting bytes to make a decision.

I agree we need some sort of guidance about what constitutes a minor edit, 
which is why I'm glad we've got such guidance on 
http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Contributing_FAQ

LP (camembert)

I keep forgetting to enclose wikikarma - here's two:
http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inigo_Jones (new)
http://www.wikipedia.org/w/wiki.phtml?title=Masque&diff=0&oldid=560981