User:JoKalliauer/Mass editing

Note: You are allowed to edit this page!

You are cordially invited to change mistakes and links. You are allowed to change/extend the content of the page, without asking me, however if you suggest bigger changes, you might first talk about it on the discussion page. I know optimization is controversial, if you have an opposing position you are very welcome to edit the page, since it should contain pros and cons from an neutral perspective.

Minor edits

This essay describes which minor changes are desired and which are not.

Reordering categories

In short: if you are not sure, keep them as they are.

Reordering categories is a minor visual change to the description page, and should never be done without some other significant change to the page.

This topic is controversial because there are differing opinions about ordering categories:

1. The (main) file-uploader(s) should decide the order of categories
2. The categories should be sorted from most important to less important categories.
3. The categories should be sorted alphabetically.
4. The categories should not be rearranged, to not mess up diff-links with irrelevant data.

If you are not sure which rule to follow, it might be best to keep it as it is and accept that others see it differently.

If you want to add a category it might be best to add it at the end, which is identical to the behavior of Help:Gadget-HotCat.

Pure source-code edits

In short: don't do such edits

Mass edits without a significant visual change are not allowed on either the description-page or the SVG source code. Making an SVG file validate or reducing its file size does not justify uploading a new version.

Source-code edits of a few description pages or files are outside the scope of this essay. Such edits are often tolerated (e.g., optimizing one's own SVG files).

When an educational demonstration of another SVG-code-possibility should be shown, instead of uploading a new file version it might be sufficient to just display the other SVG code; as at e,g, Air Medal ribbon.svg.

Additional invisible source-code harmonizations

In short: accepted/desired

Invisible source-code edits should never be done without a visual change. There was no written rule on Commons if additional invisible source-code harmonizations are desired or undesired. However there are years of practice of cleanups and non-pure source-code-edits of several users (on Commons and in several wikipedias), which got an accepted tradition to do so. This can be interpreted as an unwritten rule that such edits are desired.

Examples of such edits are:

• changing the order of parameters of the templates (e.g. sorting the parameters of {{Information}}) to match the order the parameters appear in the description page)
• harmonizing upper and lower cases of parameter names
• changing [[User:Username|Username]] to {{U|Username}}
• removing empty |Permission= and |other_versions= parameters
• removing hidden underscores (e.g., [[Mass_editing|mass edits]] to [[Mass editing|mass edits]])

Of course it can become necessary to change something when a template is changed - normally such changes remain invisible.

See also

Most information can already be found elsewhere:

• en.wiki: w:en:Wikipedia:Mass editing
• de.wiki: w:de:Hilfe:Kleine Änderungen#Was keine kleinen Änderungen sind
• svg-edits: Help:SVG guidelines#SVG sourcecode edits without visual change