Hello,
Is there an agreed definition of what is or is not a "minor edit"? I haven't been able to find one, so I've just been guessing. I suspect that most people are just guessing. So if it's such a big deal to people, perhaps there should be clearer guidelines on what should or should not be marked as a minor edit. Perhaps the "minor edit" box should have a link by it, with the text "What is a minor edit?", linking to a page of such guidelines.
As for naughty people sneaking in major changes by pretending that they are minor, it wouldn't make any difference what the defaults were. Even with the "minor edit" box not ticked by default, all someone has to do is click on it - hardly a difficult task for our hypothetical naughty person! If anyone is worried about people doing this, the only thing they can do is deselect the option to hide minor edits from the "Recent changes" page.
Oliver
+-------------------------------------------+ | Oliver Pereira | | Dept. of Electronics and Computer Science | | University of Southampton | | omp199@ecs.soton.ac.uk | +-------------------------------------------+