Automatically Added Edit Summaries

Wikipedia has various editing mechanisms that don't involve clicking the Edit This Page tab directly. These edits are treated just the same as any other edit and show up normally in the article's revision history. When edits are made using nonstandard means, however, the edit summary is often filled in automatically by the MediaWiki software.

Editing a section

When you follow an Edit This Section link next to an article's subheading, the software automatically fills in the summary field with the name of the section you are editing. In the Edit summary field, the name appears between asterisks and slashes, like this: /*Further Reading*/. In the article history, the edited section title appears in grayed-out type next to a right-pointing arrow (↔), which is a clickable link to that section of the article.

Using rollback or undo

The Undo button displays on the history page and lets you reverse a particular edit. The Rollback button is similar but can only be used by administrators. When these buttons are used, the summary of the resulting edit contains the term rollback (as in "rollback version to X") or undo (as in "version X undid by phoebe to version Y") with links.

Bots and editing tools

An edit summary that contains the text AWB refers to an edit that was completed with the help of the AutoWiki Browser, an automated tool (see Chapter 7). This and other tools help editors make repetitive edits (such as correcting spelling) or quickly revert vandalism. An edit summary that refers to a bot was made by an automatic program that performs even more highly repetitive tasks.

Other circumstances

Any edit summary with a left-pointing arrow (←) was added automatically by the software when no edit summary is provided by the editor. This only occurs when a page is blanked, when the page content is completely replaced (often vandalism), or when a new page or redirect is created. See [[Wikipedia:Automatic edit summaries]] (shortcut WP:AES).

Further Reading

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Edit_summary_legend A longer list of common edit summaries, arranged by type of action

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Automatic_edit_summaries About automatically added edit summaries