User talk:Jd4556

Editing tip

Learn to love the "show preview" button. Otherwise each of your edits shows up separately in the file history and is just darn confusing. Also, you won't have to deal with the "prove that you're a person" security features as often. Donsheldon 10:58, 8 October 2007 (EDT)

Furthermore, the wiki database can only track a certain number of changes, after which it has to dump the oldest revision records out of history. Thus, the ability to roll back or review history of other pages is hamstrung by a flood of edits on just one page. Worse still (though rarely a big risk) if a vandal comes in and is deleting pages as you are doing "microedits," you could push out the record(s) of the pre-vandalism page(s) and, thus, make us have to recreate the page(s) from scratch (i.e. from memory or from some off-site archive). Finally, I am sure a revision record in the db takes up a little bit of storage just to BE a record (date, time, user#, index; the "bones" of a record) and so a one- or two-word edit is, basically, taking more storage to maintain its history than to record the actual differences between the previous and current page (the "meat" of a revision record).

Long story short: Don explains above how to make life easier on yourself and on us who review most (or all) changes; I am hoping to show how using Preview more will make it easier on the site and harder on vandals. It's a win-win-win-win situation. (Note: If you find that you have to fix typos a lot, install a plug-in that spell-checks for you; Firefox comes with one by default, IIRC, or at the least makes it trivial to install one. It catches a LOT of my typing errors.) Thanks! --David Artman 10:22, 9 October 2007 (EDT)

I apologize for any problems I may have caused 8o(. As a computer programmer, I'm so used to saving my work periodically that it never dawned on me that it would create problems or headaches. I'll make sure to not use the save button until I'm actually finished with the edits. Thanks for the advice and the explanations. I appreciate it 8o).