[WikiEN-l] Little edits or big edits in the mainspace?

[Carcharoth]

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 at gmail.com> wrote:
> As the title indicates, when working on articles, do you prefer making a
> bunch of small edits or one or a couple of big edits?
>
> Personally, I started out making lots of small edits, but lately I've
> been the opposite of that.
>
> -MuZemike
>
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