When using hotcat or eradicating a particular typo I make small or minor edits. Otherwise I try to remember to save frequently, but a couple of times I've been caught out and lost the odd hour or two of work due to a computer problem. I've also learned to save frequently when at newpage patrol or other places where edit conflicts are likely. The only time when I'd recommend making a really big edit in mainspace is when creating a new article. The risk of incorrect speedy tags is so high that it is worth the risk of not saving for an hour or so. WereSpielChequers On 17 September 2010 22:14, Renata St <renatawiki(a)gmail.com> wrote:

On 17 September 2010 22:14, Renata St <renatawiki(a)gmail.com> wrote: Pfft, who cares about that? Literally, I mean: these days the focus (on enwiki at least) is on how many "featured credits" an editor has, or variants thereof like "good article credits". Which is a far better system IMO. AGK

I always mean to do less edits but end up doing more. I try to get a new article *just right* and invariably find several typos, each after I've corrected the previous one. Fixing typos in articles I'm casually reading works much the same way. - d.

On Sat, Sep 18, 2010 at 1:05 AM, William Beutler <williambeutler(a)gmail.com> wrote: *Non* Wikipedians are asking you about your edit count? I've never encountered nor heard of people outside the community talking about such a thing. I find your experience quite cheering; it seems to speak of Wikipedia seeping into the culture even more than I had presupposed. It's like my grandmother asking me how many beats per minute characterise [[UK hard house]].

On Sat, Sep 18, 2010 at 1:57 AM, William Beutler <williambeutler(a)gmail.com> wrote: Have you seen this? Have a look at the PDF: http://outreach.wikimedia.org/wiki/Bookshelf And there's plenty more proposed publications that need input for the same series: http://outreach.wikimedia.org/wiki/Overview_of_Deliverables_(Bookshelf) Project home page: http://outreach.wikimedia.org/wiki/Bookshelf_Project

On high-traffic articles, or one where you are making complicated changes, it is often best to split things up and explain using edit summaries. It helps other editors follow what changes you have made. For new articles, or ones where you are the only editor or one of only a few editors, bigger changes and complete rewrites are less disconcerting. There may even be some readers who follow the edit summaries and step through the page history as well. Also, if you do things in stages, someone else, looking through the page history, can learn a lot about the different things that go into editing a Wikipedia article. The two extremes are: (1) Writing an article offline that is close to featured status and saving that in one edit (but there will always be a need to get the article reviewed by others before putting it forward for formal review, as others will always see things that you miss, or have valid improvements to suggest); versus (2) Writing an entire article in stages (with or without others) and building it up *logically*, step-by-step from a stub to a featured article (and then turning that into some sort of video presentation or animated slideshow so others can learn from it). I wonder how many discrete "learnable" steps and edits a featured article, or various standard types of articles, can be broken down into? Carcharoth On Fri, Sep 17, 2010 at 9:31 PM, MuZemike <muzemike(a)gmail.com> wrote: