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Please auto-merge edit-summary on edit merge

Previously, when I made an edit to a post and then quickly started another edit to the same post, I was shown the edit summary of the old edit and so I could just modify it to reflect the additional changes.

So, for example, I made an edit with the summary “change 1”, then made another edit, where I changed the summary from “change 1” to “change 1; change 2”.

I think this worked well.

But recently, I see different behavior: when I start a new edit quickly, the old edit summary is not shown, but the edits are still merged. But this means the edit summary was lost. I could try to create the correct summary, but I may not remember what exactly the old summary was and I also don't know the rules for merging edits.

For example, I made an edit with the summary “change 1”, then made another edit, with the summary “change 2”. But the result is only one edit with both changes, but only one summary.

For a concrete example, see this question. I first made an edit to the title with the summary “rm tag from title”. Then I made an edit to the body of the question, with the summary “code formatting”. But the two edits were merged, so the first summary was lost.

Why did this change? Could the old behavior be restored? Or alternatively, could the summaries be merged automatically?

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marked as duplicate by kiamlaluno, jonsca, Toon Krijthe, Bo Persson, ChrisF Sep 30 '12 at 20:48


@kiamlaluno: I think this is not a duplicate, as it looks like the feature was already there and then disappeared. –  Paŭlo Ebermann Sep 30 '12 at 13:24

1 Answer 1

If they're within the five-minute grace period, they're considered the same edit, and therefore the last summary holds. If each minor edit within that grace period were to stand alone, there would be no point to the grace period... you could have 40 summaries all appended to each other because each edit was a minor edit but different.

I suggest either (a) waiting 5 minutes before performing a completely unrelated edit, or (b) adding to the final summary yourself if you notice that they are merged.

As an aside, I don't think every single minor edit absolutely needs to be explained in the summary... some are pretty obvious and it's only people reviewing edits who see them anyway.

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Yeah, but how am I supposed to write correct summaries? Should I always watch the clock (“was it 5 minutes since I made the edit or not?”) and remember what changes I made? –  svick Jun 29 '12 at 21:47
It's easy to tell if you just committed a new edit - the timestamp will say "edited just now" instead of "edited n minutes ago." If it says "just now" you can click it again and update the edit summary. You're not afraid that you're going to forget the other edits you made in the last 5 minutes, are you? If this is a frequent problem then I suggest either you're editing too many posts or you should slow down and not make so many independent, minor edits. There is no race. –  Aaron Bertrand Jun 29 '12 at 21:54

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