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Automatic edit summaries are created by the MediaWiki software for certain actions. These summaries appear in recent changes, page histories, and contributions lists, unless you provide your own edit summary.
Auto edit summaries exist for several actions, if the user fails to provide an edit summary:
- Blanking a page
- Replacing entire page with other text, removing more than 90% of the content of a page
- Creating a new page (the first 200 characters of the article appear in the summary)
- Adding, changing, or removing a redirect
- Reverting a revision
Additionaly, when you use section editing, the section title will appear in the edit summary box in light grey text between comment tags, and used as your summary unless you alter or replace it.
Typing the summary is unimportant when a user creates a new page; leaving the summary area blank, the edit summary in this case is automatically set to "Created page with", followed by around 200 characters of the entered wikitext (the maximum summary length), with a trailing ellipsis.
If the summary describes a redirect or replacement of the content with a {{copyvio}} template, this most likely means that an editor allowed the software to generate the summary out of convenience. If the listed target or replacement text is reasonable, no further action is required.
A summary indicative of an inappropriate edit (such as the blanking or replacement of legitimate content) is probably not a deliberate description on the part of the user (who might not even have realized that they were harming Wikipedia).