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February 2022 edit

  Hi Popinade! I noticed that you recently marked an edit as minor at Elizabeth Rata that may not have been. "Minor edit" has a very specific definition on Wikipedia – it refers only to superficial edits that could never be the subject of a dispute, such as typo corrections or reverting obvious vandalism. Any edit that changes the meaning of an article is not a minor edit, even if it only concerns a single word. Please see Help:Minor edit for more information. Until you have read the guidance on this, simply don’t mark your edits as minor. Schwede66 18:44, 1 February 2022 (UTC)Reply

Hi Schwede! Thank you for your message. I would not wish to make the mistake of marking edits as minor when they are not. Following the guide, I believed what I marked as minor "requires no review and could never be the subject of a dispute." However, this was a judgement and one should probably never say "never." I made quite a few edits to the Elizabeth Rata page that I thought were minor. Could you be specific about the ones you do not consider minor, please? In the meantime I will not mark my edits as minor. Thanks again.Popinade (talk) 19:36, 1 February 2022 (UTC)Reply

Sure. Not minor edits because:

  • [1] you deleted the title of the publication
  • [2] you've added content to the reference and whilst that's borderline, the formatting of the page range is wrong so it needs review
  • [3] most certainly not a minor edit as it's way beyond "typographical corrections, corrections of minor formatting errors, and reversion of obvious vandalism"
  • [4] you are adding content (and yes, that includes references)
  • [5] you are adding content
  • [6] you are adding another reference
  • [7] and another reference
  • [8] and another reference
  • [9] this maybe comes closest to being a minor edit but it's more than a "typographical correction" as you added a word (and not just a missing letter in a misspelled word)
  • [10] you changed the titles in references

Hence, exactly zero of your edits marked as minor were in fact minor edits. Schwede66 22:53, 1 February 2022 (UTC)Reply

Thank you for the clarification. I see the issue. I must have read the guidelines either a long while ago or perhaps too cursorily.
On reading the "minor edit" page carefully I see that you are correct in that even the word "of" could be considered more than minor, although it certainly does not change the meaning as would removal of "not."
It would be interesting to know why adding a reference is not considered a minor edit. I imagine it is because the addition of references is considered a valuable contribution. If that is the case, it is a shame that the references I added on Rata's page are no longer there.
In sum, I'm sorry that, out of ignorance, I mislabeled a number of edits as minor. Nonetheless, I think it should be obvious that I had no intention of misleading with these labels.
I will not be editing the page further as that may be seen as "edit warring" considering that almost everything I have contributed has been reverted.
I would be interested to know, however if you are happy with the factual content I added now being unavailable to Wikipedia users. Also, it seems very unusual for Wikipedia editors to insist on keeping an edit (the one referring to Pihama) which insinuates that the subject of the page is racist. Surely that is subpar for the website.Popinade (talk) 01:11, 2 February 2022 (UTC)Reply
My pleasure. Even adding a reference can be controversial as often, sources themselves can be problematic (not independent, biased, not reliable, etc). Now that you know a bit more, I encourage you to go back and make further edits. If there is further reversal going on, the next step is to go to the talk page and engage in discussion with those who revert you. Use Template:Reply to to notify other editors of such discussion requests. With regards to your "factual content" questions, I shall stay out of that debate; I'd rather keep a high-level overview and make sure that every contributor abides by the rules. Schwede66 02:36, 2 February 2022 (UTC)Reply
Thank you for your advice.Popinade (talk) 22:22, 8 February 2022 (UTC)Reply