Community Wishlist Survey 2017/Editing/Dividing section name from edit summary

From Meta, a Wikimedia project coordination wiki

Dividing section name from edit summary

  • Problem: When you write an edit summary, then there are suggestions for your edit summary, which contain many edit summaries you have written in your last edits. But when you edit only for example the section "2012" and want to write "link fix" into the summary, then there are suggested all the summaries, you wrote "link fix" in the last times and that contain "2012" in their section name. So for example "/*2012–2014/* link fix". This is really unnecessary, because I always have edited the section "2012" and never "2012–2014", when I would write this edit summary. And also when I have already written a hundred times "link fix" in the edit summary, but never in a section called "2012", then there are no suggestions for this one.
  • Who would benefit: Uhm... everyone using edit summaries.
  • Proposed solution: The edit summary suggestions should not include the section name, but only the real summary. When I write "link f" then I should get exactly one suggestion for "link fix", where it does not matter in which sections I have written this summary in the past.
  • More comments:
  • Phabricator tickets:

Discussion[edit]

Can't you just triple-click the default summary before starting typing (or select it all other way) so that you overwrite it? In your case it probably does not matter which section you have fixed the link in indeed, while there are cases where it is important (for example if one is voting in an RfX page) --Base (talk) 20:44, 15 November 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Ain't that a suggestion by your browser instead of the wiki-software? Grüße vom Sänger ♫(Reden) 09:36, 16 November 2017 (UTC)[reply]

You might want to remove the section title because it or your comment is long and you don't have enough space, for example. Moving the section title out of the edit box would make that impossible. (Although with the new increased comment field length that might be less of a concern.) --Tgr (WMF) (talk) 11:55, 18 November 2017 (UTC)[reply]

@Kenny McFly: Ping in case you didn't see the comment above, and in case you want to refine/improve the wording in the Proposal above before the voting begins next week. (You might want to include the keywords "form-history" and "autocomplete") Quiddity (WMF) (talk) 19:29, 20 November 2017 (UTC)[reply]
Okay. It seems, that it is really just a browser's thing. In this case I withdraw this wish. Thanks to User:Sänger. --Kenny McFly (talk) 19:33, 20 November 2017 (UTC)[reply]
Kenny McFly, the suggestions are done by the browser, but having bits of default summary is by MediaWiki. Knowing that there is the pretty much standard completion suggestion in all browsers, it is up to MediaWiki coders (and users here) to define if it is more useful than not to have a default summary. To me the default summary is much more of a nuisance than useful. First, for the reason you mention, as it breaks the browser's suggestions. Second, the section is often useless, the best way to check a new edit is to use a diff, which should show the section for context, not to visually scan a section. I understand opinions may vary a lot on the weights for these reasons, so I think this is a clear case for an *option* (defaulting to the current behaviour would probably be the best) - Nabla (talk) 21:38, 30 November 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Voting[edit]