Help:Edit summary

When editing an article, there is a small field labeled "Summary" under the main edit-box. It looks like this:

It is highly recommended that one fill in the edit summary field, as it makes it easier for you and your fellow contributors to understand what has changed, and is helpful when going through the history of the page.

The Deadeyes Biography

Deadeyes Bio. Born in Milwaukie, OR (circa 2001) due to the lack of rock in the area.

Originally Pat "the Birdman" Mayfield was on rhythm guitar, Shehan "the Shrik" Nattar on lead, and Danny Hainley on drums, everyone on vocals.

Before beginning their world tour, a roadie was needed and Eric Wilfred White stepped up to the position, proving he was worthy in ways that can't be mentioned here.

In the early stages of the group, Erich Feltz was on vocals. He never actually learned any Deadeyes material; he is mostly known for his vocal contributions on Iron Man (2001) and Bohemian Rhapsody (2002) at the 2 St. LaSalle Day Deadeyes performances. The Deadeyes needed a bass so Steven Myers was added. Steve was a slacker and lived in Vancouver so he was replaced with Nick Neal, who couldn't keep up with the essence the other 3 hoped the Deadeyes would one day become.

Replacements for a bass were nowhere to be found, so the Birdman pulled a McCartney and took up his present roll as the basser. The band made its one and only public release the last days before they all went off to college the summer of 2002. This can be found at their website for free download.

The Birdman moved to SOU to study music (guitar and possibly education) and is currently a member of the Vampirates, Danny OSU (now Portland State) for veterinary (now chiropractic) reasons, and the Shrik UO for music. They perform together any chance they get, which is not very often. The band is now on hiatus until all three are living in the same area again.

Since college, White's roadie position has consistently become less secure. His love for the alcohol has hurt his relationship with the Deadeyes and most importantly, caused him to miss the Government Camp show.

Self-claimed "biggest Deadeyes fan" (and rightly so) Luke Maxwell-Muir has stepped up recently to show appreciation for the Deadeyes by setting up shows for them and always rocking out harder than anyone at performances. Because of Wilfred's lack of responsibility, a replacement roadie is possibly needed and Luke is first on the list.

Recently, Jake "X-Death" the Snake (Luke's younger brother) has offered his bass playing skills to replace those of the Birdman's in the Deadeyes. X-Death thinks he's hot shit, so the Birdman has accepted this as a challenge and if X-Death proves himself worthy, the Birdman will secede back to where he belongs...on rhythm guitar.

Places where the edit summary appears

The edit summary appears in black italics in the following places:

• Page history - list of changes to the page you edited
• User contributions - list of all your edits
• Watchlist* - list of recent changes to watched pages (logged-in users only)
• diff page - shows the difference between two edits
• Recent changes* - list of all recent edits
• Wikipedia IRC channels* - real time list of all edits
• Related changes* - list of recent changes to pages linked to the page you edited
• List of new pages: shows the edit summary of the creation.

* These show the edit summary of the last edit. Since one is typically interested in all recent changes in these articles, with all edit summaries, these features are used in conjunction with the page histories of the articles shown.

Abbreviations

See Edit summary legend for a list of commonly used abbreviations in edit summaries.

Searching

The Wikimedia search function can not search edit summaries, and they are not indexed by external search engines.

File upload summary

When uploading an image one can supply an upload summary. This serves multiple purposes:

• as second part of the automatically created edit summary of the upload log (the first part giving the file name)
• as text in the entry of the image history
• in the case that the file name of the image is new:
  • as edit summary for the creation of the image page
  • as wikitext for the editable part of the image page, which includes the following possibilities:
    • briefly describe the image
    • provide internal or external links
    • call templates
    • specify one or more categories the image is in

The capacity of the upload summary is one line of 250 characters; in the upload log the last part may fall off, because this can contain 255 characters, including "uploaded "filename"".

Note that there is no preview function to check the code for the links, template calls and category tags, but of course, if needed one can edit the image page after uploading, to correct errors and also to extend the text.

See also Help:Image page.

Section title as automatic edit summary

When applying the section editing feature the section title is automatically inserted as initial version or first part of the edit summary. Put more details after this text. In the case that you provide a long summary yourself you can delete the section title in order to stay within the limit of 200 characters.

When inserting a section by applying section editing on the section before or after it, delete the automatic edit summary to avoid confusion.

Since MediaWiki version 1.3 (May 2004), the automatic part of the summary is no longer surrounded by "="-signs, but it appears by default in grey text, with the manually typed part being in black text. The old style remains in edits from that time.

From MediaWiki version 1.4 (Dec 2004), the section title that forms the automatic part of the edit summary is preceded by a right arrow that links to the section. For this purpose the section title within the marks /* and */ is preloaded in the edit summary box. This code can also be manually inserted.

"Post a comment" feature

When starting a new thread on a Talk page, optionally the "Post a comment" feature can be used. Then the edit summary is automatically the same as the new section header.

Rendering of wikitext; URLs

http://www.theshrik.com