 | This is aninformation page. It is not anencyclopedic article, nor one ofWikipedia's policies or guidelines; rather, its purpose is to explain certain aspects of Wikipedia's norms, customs, technicalities, or practices. It may reflect differing levels ofconsensus andvetting. |
 | This page in a nutshell: Checking the minor edit box is only for superficial changes that are unlikely to be disputed, such as typographical corrections. Any edit that alters the meaning of an article, even slightly, is not minor. |
A check to theminor edit box signifies that only superficial differences exist between the current and previous versions. Examples includetypographical corrections, corrections of minor formatting errors, and reversion of obviousvandalism. Aminor edit requires no review and could never be the subject of a dispute. An edit of this kind is marked in its page'srevision history with a lowercase, bolded "m" character (m).
By contrast, all concerned editors should review a major edit for its acceptability. Any change affecting an article's meaning is not minor, even if it concerns a single word.
Because editors may choose to ignore minor edits when reviewingrecent changes, the distinction between major and minor edits is significant. Logged-in users can set theirpreferences not to display minor edits. If there is any chance that another editor might dispute a change, the edit should not be marked as minor. (If an editor considers a change to be minor yet conceivably controversial, one option is to include the word "minor" in theedit summary without ticking the "minor edit" box.)
Users who are notlogged in to Wikipedia or are in mobile mode are not permitted to mark changes as minor because of the potential for vandalism.[a] The ability to mark changes as minor isamong the many reasons to create and use an account on Wikipedia to edit.
A good rule of thumb is that only edits consistingsolely of spelling corrections, formatting changes, or rearrangement of text without modification of the content may be flagged as minor edits.
It's acceptable to never mark a single edit as "minor". If other editors complain about your use of the "minor" edit flag, then it's likely a good idea to stop using it.
Below the edit summary field in the desktop version of the editor, there is a checkbox that says, "This is aminor edit". Most browsers supportaccess keys (keyboard shortcuts); the access key for the minor edit checkbox isi. You can mark and save an edit quickly by using the access keys for minor edit (i) and save (s).
When filling in the edit summary, you may also pressTab ↹,Space to check the minor edit box quickly.
Administrators androllbackers can semi-automatically revert the edits of the last editor of a page; all suchrollback reversions are marked as minor by the wiki software. The intended use of the rollback feature is for cases of vandalism, where the act of reverting any vandalism should be considered minor (and can be ignored in the recent changes list).Moving orprotecting a page appear as minor edits in a page's history in addition to being recorded in the Move and Protectionlogs respectively. Also,Wikidata edits are always marked as minor on Wikipedia for users that choose to display them in their watchlist/recent changes.
Additionally,bot accounts usually mark their edits as minor in addition to the "bot" flag.
