Editing Help:Minor edit (section)

== Things to remember ==
* Marking a major change as a minor one is considered poor etiquette, especially if the change involves the deletion of some text.
* Consequently, if you are in doubt about whether an edit is minor or not, it is ''always'' safer ''not'' to mark it as minor.
* [[Help:Reverting|Reverting]] a substantive edit is not likely to be considered minor under most circumstances. When the status of a page is disputed, and particularly if an edit war is brewing, then it is better not to mark ''any'' edit as minor. Reverting blatant vandalism or an obvious typographical error is an exception to this rule.
* If you ''accidentally'' mark an edit as minor when it was, in fact, a major edit, you should make a second edit, or [[Help:Dummy edit|dummy edit]], to supplement your first edit. Simply note in the [[Help:Edit summary|edit summary]] of your second edit that the previous edit was major, don't mark the edit as minor, and save your change. When saved, your dummy edit will be logged as a revision change in the page's [[H:PH|edit history]] and listed immediately above your original edit. Just [[Wikipedia:Null edit|opening the edit box and saving]] (i.e., changing nothing) will not work. In addition, certain changes will not work if they do not affect the presentation of the page in [[HTML]], such as adding a blank space at the end of a line or a blank line at the end of the page; in these cases, the edit is canceled and the edit summary discarded. However, one can, for example, add an extra space between two words. This will be preserved in the wikitext and recorded as a change, although it will not change the page's appearance when rendered.
* It may be worth communicating any disagreement about what is minor via Talk or a message to the contributor, being careful to avoid a flame war. There is a grey area, and many contributors will appreciate feedback on whether they have got it right.
* Marking your change as minor affects how it displays in some [[Help:Watching pages#Watchlist|editors' watchlists]]. If, for example, you mark your talk page comments as "minor", then fewer editors are likely to notice your comment.
* The designation of a change as minor or major is not a reflection of how much work went into making the change. For instance, even if you spent several hours finding and resolving problems with the formatting of references, the change would still be ''called'' minor. Editors should not feel that marking a change as minor devalues their effort.
* The use of this feature is optional.