Hi,

I wondered where to raise this and decided to do it here.

The message that asks for to write the edit summary in VisualEditor is "Describe what you changed".

In the source editor it's just "Summary" in the core. In the English Wikipedia, however, it's modified to "[[Help:Edit summary|Edit summary]] (Briefly describe the changes you have made)".

The VisualEditor is used a lot by new editors (it's an impression, but I'm pretty sure that the data will say the same). The idea of the edit summary is to help the people who patrol recent changes or read the article history. When new editors, who aren't so familiar with Wikipedia's edit summary culture, are asked to "Describe what you changed", they may answer: "the year when he was born". This is a correct answer as far as the editor is concerned, but it's not so helpful in the context of recent changes.

I don't know about other languages, but this actually happens quite a lot in the Hebrew Wikipedia, and some patrollers are complaining about it. (In grammatical terms, the summary is written as a direct object: "Describe what you changed" -> (I changed) "the year".)

Now I could change this to something clearer in the translation to this particular language, but I like to be thorough when it comes to UI messages, so I'd like to ask the pros here: How would you design the edit summary box? The requirements I can think of are:

1. Encourage the user to actually write the edit summary. People not writing summaries at all is a bigger problem than writing them not clearly as I wrote above.

2. Encourage to write it in a way that would be useful to the people who will read them in Recent Changes and in reviewing previous article versions.

3. Possibly give the users tips about how to write them well, but without too much additional text.

Thanks!