Template:Editing advice

Hello and thank you for contributing to Wikipedia!

I noticed your recent work on a page required multiple edits.

Are you aware that you can see a preview of the work you're doing (to check everything looks good, and check spellings and punctuation etc.) before submitting the work to the public?

Just to the right of the Publish changes button, you'll see the Show preview button. By using this to check our work before saving the page, we can keep the page history easier to understand and reduce the possibility of edit conflicts and misunderstandings.

It's good practice to always leave a short comment about what work we did in the edit summary (the text entry field just above the Publish changes and Show preview buttons).

This helps other editors tell at a glance what you have done. Sometimes, without an edit summary, your work may be considered thoughtless or belligerent, and be undone.

Summaries are also especially useful when reviewing page histories, to see without the need to load and visually parse each diff, what each of possibly thousands of edits changed.

If you're going to be doing a lot of editing here (all efforts are greatly appreciated), you might like to LINK TO PUBLIC SANDBOX FOR IPs or LINK TO REGISTERED USERS OWN SANDBOX WITH PRELOAD IF IT DOESN'T ALREADY EXIST.

A sandbox is the perfect place to test and develop work that might require a lot of changes over a period of hours or days. And you needn't worry about making any mistakes there, so it's perfect for practising more complicated editing.

Whatever you choose, happy editing! ~~~~