Familypedia:Edit summary

Below each edit box contributors are invited to type or paste an edit summary. It should give later readers (of the Page history, User contributions, Recent changes, or a few other pages) a good indication of what you have done (and maybe why), preferably enough for them to know whether they want to open the edit to see exactly what you did.

There are several good reasons for not leaving it blank. One is that a blank raises suspicion among diligent readers, who may be more inclined to revert your edit if they have to open it and don't like it or don't understand it. Another reason is that in some circumstances there will be an automatic summary containing about the first 200 characters of the edit, which makes "Recent changes" longer and harder to read. So it is recommended that all diligent users set their user preferences (under "Editing") to "Prompt me when entering a blank edit summary".

It can include internal and interwiki links but not external links, formatting, or nowiki or HTML tags.

It cannot be edited after the page is saved, and it cannot be searched for within the wiki or found by search engines.