Serial Tweaker

These sort of editors make an edit and then realize they didn't do what they wanted to, that they could have put something better, or that there's something more to be said.[1] So they make another edit. And another, and another, and another, until it's finally perfect—or the server breaks, or sanity is lost, whichever comes first. For some people, getting the edits perfect the first time is difficult. It's easier to complete the edit, no longer have the stress of one's browser or the site losing one's work, and then calmly re-read one's work.

While practical, this type of edit fills up the page history with garbage edits, which often becomes annoying. We have a Preview feature—you can do the testing before entering your edit, so be sure to do so. You can also play around with different kinds of markup in the Wiki Sandbox. Some wikis will ban for "spamming recent changes" while others will default to "enhanced recent changes" which hides it.

In Fora, this often produces an ominous, suspicious looking "post edited by author on ??/??/???? ??:??:??" message.

It goes by various names:

Notes

  1. ↑ Or they misspelled something, or they see that someone else has misspelled something, or one or more works haven't been moved to their proper Namespaces, etc. Or it's one of the few cases for which MediaWiki still doesn't support preview.
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