Community Wishlist Survey 2022/Bots and gadgets/Edit summary assistant

Random proposal ►◄ Bots and gadgets The survey has concluded. Here are the results!

Edit summary assistant

Problem: Regarding edit summaries, many edits do not include them, some editors do not leave them with their edits, and many summaries that are left are less helpful than is possible, often lacking links to supporting information, and being written in a wide range of varied styles.
Proposed solution: It would be useful to have means easily available while using edit windows, maybe via drop down menu, maybe from the "Edit summary" field, to help editors to leave helpful standardized edit summaries. Such a capacity could save time and improve quality. I have compiled a page of edit summaries which can provide an initial source of standardized summaries. That page is linked in my User page, in the section titled "Edit summaries". Feel free to copy anything on that page and edit it elsewhere in any way desired, but please do not edit that page. Thank you.
Who would benefit: All editors, even the most expert.
More comments:
Phabricator tickets:
Proposer: Jerryobject (talk) 09:55, 22 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Discussion

Convenience link to the page mentioned in the description: w:User:Jerryobject/Edit summaries.

I think it would be useful to have a few standardised edit summaries available, translated into different languages. I only speak English but there's quite a lot of small maintenance tasks on other wikis that are actually easy to perform without much knowledge of a language (other than wikitext). However what always puts me off is not knowing what to put in the edit summary. the wub "?!" 16:48, 23 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]

This is w:Wikipedia:Canned edit summaries. It could be useful, but there are concerns it'd help facilitate vandalism, so it's necessary to tread cautiously. {{u|Sdkb}} ^talk 19:00, 28 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]

We actually have something like this on pl.wiki almost since forever :pl:MediaWiki:Gadget-edit-summaries.js. There aren't as many as on the above list. I'm not sure if such a long list could be done in a useful way. We have a short and pretty universal list with buttons divded into groups (about 30 buttons). You can see it in action as green buttons: example edit in Polish (buttons are only shown in Polish).

Note that users can add their own summary-buttons in their vector.js or common.js (just a simple function call). The script kind of works in VE even, layout is not perfect, but it mostly works. Nux (talk) 13:05, 30 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Many projects have a variation of this, but standardising them into a single tool (not necessarily enabled by default) seems helpful. ~~~~
User:1234qwer1234qwer4 (talk) 22:22, 7 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Predictive typing may be nicest solution: a drop-down takes 1 click,which requires additional user attention, but getting the right item by typing a couple first characters may make it super-fast (or at least faster than typing out or clicking around). It could a drop-down that filters itself as you type. Cryout (talk) 14:55, 11 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Voting

Support --NGC 54 (talk｜contribs) 23:00, 28 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]
Support Daud Iffa (talk) 23:49, 28 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]
Support --𝑇𝑚𝑣 (𝑡𝑎𝑙𝑘) 00:58, 29 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]
Support Ottawajin (talk) 05:32, 29 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]
Support SCIdude (talk) 07:49, 29 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]
Support Perhaps a similar feature to one that the OpenStreetMap editor iD uses would be helpful, where it offers a dropdown of your recent changeset comments to select from on the right side of the text input box. It's a slick UI trick that works well in my opinion. Mbrickn (talk) 15:30, 29 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]
Support We should analyse existing summaries, identify statistically popular ones and then create a few options (maybe checkboxes like the "Small edit" one) that can be quickly ticked. I guess "grammar", "references", "proofreading", "data update" could be the top ones. I also assume that AI could identify the nature of the edit (especially in the above categories) but probably not at the current sad level of Wiki tech. --SSneg (talk) 20:43, 29 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]
Support Thingofme (talk) 02:18, 30 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]
Support TheInternetGnome (talk) 07:25, 30 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]
Support —— Eric Liu_（Talk） 07:54, 30 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]
Support SD hehua (talk) 10:14, 30 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]
Support I would support adding a nice API for adding buttons in groups. That would have to be an easy to use API so that users could easily use it. I don't think it is feasible to add universal buttons that would work for all wikis, so there would have to be some per-site configuration. --Nux (talk) 13:13, 30 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]
Support --g (talk) 15:17, 30 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]
Support Titore (talk) 17:21, 30 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]
Support Libcub (talk) 21:32, 30 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]
Support Daniel Case (talk) 05:04, 31 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]
Support Qazwsx777 (talk) 09:29, 31 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]
Support Some solutions already exist and would indeed be nice to have as core features! Trizek ^{from FR} 11:58, 31 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]
Support IAmChaos (talk) 17:57, 31 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]
Support I used the cache information of my web browser in the past and that helped to spare time, I remember years ago that I pointed out how we needed something like that on a local Wiki. Nobody was interested, it's time we handle this at the central level. I hope it can by customized as well.--Alexmar983 (talk) 01:59, 1 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]
Support Alain Artivalys (talk) 13:17, 1 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]
Support have some problems myself at times, an assistant is sure good. Paradise Chronicle (talk) 04:45, 2 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]
Support Zippybonzo (talk) 17:34, 2 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]
Support ★NealMcB★ (talk) 23:35, 2 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]
Support Paucabot (talk) 06:15, 3 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]
Support HyperDrive05 (talk) 17:10, 3 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]
Support Fernando Archuby (talk) 17:44, 3 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]
Support And make it mandatory too! =) Vega (talk) 18:00, 3 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]
Support.Need it.-- MASUM THE GREAT (talk) 11:26, 4 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]
Support SlowByte (talk) 18:42, 4 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]
Support - Darwin ^Ahoy! 20:57, 4 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]
Support Sir Proxima Centauri (talk) 10:41, 5 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]
Support I'm definitely guilty of forgetting to leave a summary every so often, or hitting the enter key too soon. And this would help with edits from anonymous users. paul2520 (talk) 19:05, 5 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]
Support Vulp❯❯❯here! 03:42, 6 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]
Support Ayumu Ozaki (talk) 05:11, 6 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]
Support Eric0892 (talk) 02:18, 7 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]
Support Hulged (talk) 02:20, 7 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]
Support LRFtheLion (talk) 02:20, 7 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]
Support Mohammad ebz (talk) 14:49, 7 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]
Support ~~~~
User:1234qwer1234qwer4 (talk) 22:23, 7 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]
Support Captainroz (talk) 06:28, 8 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]
Support KnowledgeablePersona (talk) 23:32, 8 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]
Support I think that becoming useful for write fixed-ID (ex:permanent version). --Mario1257 (talk) 16:55, 10 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]
Support if, after editing, it was proposed to fill in structured data, as on the Commons after uploading a file, it would be more interesting than now. Sunpriat (talk) 23:10, 10 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]
Support Gaurav (talk) 03:52, 11 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]