Minor Changes

Can small changes be marked as minor?

This information is usually displayed alongside Change Summary, next to edits on the Recent Changes display and the Page History displays. Like the change summary, it allows people to communicate a little extra information about what changes are taking place, which makes the recent changes and Page History displays far more useful they would be otherwise.

There are various possible interpretations of the minor change flag. Generally it indicates that the change was insignificant, and not really worth examining in detail. By contrast some changes are large and should be peer reviewed. Some changes are in fact adding comments or information which demands feedback from the community. Minor changes are just little typing corrections or other minor tweaks to contents.

Clearly users should focus on the change itself, and not spend too much time pondering about whether it is minor or not. Some might argue that the feature is an unnecessary distraction.

It can also be misused of course. If a change is marked as minor, this doesn't mean that it doesn't need to be peer reviewed. A minor change could in fact be a major change, or malicious vandalism. However this does not completely invalidate the information. A wiki community will generally build up trust relationships between the regular contributors, and so having a quick way to say “ignore this edit, it was just a minor tweak”, to your fellow contributors, is a useful feature.

To avoid misuse by anonymous vandals some Wikis restrict the availability of this feature to logged in users.