07:59, 30 Apr 2005 (UTC)

 Question about number of edits 

Hello, since the welcome message to my talk page came from you, I presume you're the person I should turn to with any questions.  I notice that every time anyone makes a change in an article, the old and new versions are stored in the history page.  I'm not terribly computer literate, but it seems that that would take up a lot of space, and I presume Wikipedia doesn't have infinite webspace.  If I see an incorrect comma in the third paragraph, a spelling error in the fifth, an incorrect link in the sixth, an incorrect date in the eighth, and unclear wording in the thirteenth, does Wikipedia prefer that I do one big edit so that it will have only one new page to store, or is it okay to save as I go along?  Are the individual versions in the history page deleted after a certain length of time?  I've been editing my user page, and just wonder whether I should leave changes until I have something big to change.

Thanks

 20:39, 29 Apr 2005 (UTC)

 (Butting in here, again, as people ask more interesting questions on Mel's talk page than on mine).  Ann, firstly, diskspace is so incredibly cheap that you could type flat out for your whole life and you wouldn't fill a drive that cost 100 euros;  so don't worry about diskspace.  This issue of what to do in an individual edit is one purely for the convenience of other people who are reading it.  So if you're doing a bunch of fairly trivial tweaks (fixing grammar, spelling, formatting, etc) then do all of those in one go (and give an edit summary like "various grammar and spelling tweaks".  If the article needs tweaks and also need a higher-level change (adding or removing a big chunk of text, fixing some wording that you thing is seriously incorrect or misreading) then do the trivial fixes in one edit, and the other fix in another (with an edit summary like "removing nonsense about Father Dougal").  So (in summary) make changes based on what is a logical unit, not what's convenient for the software.   (talk | contribs) 21:35, 29 Apr 2005 (UTC)

(Thanks for this; I've copied it to Ann Heghan's Talk page)   (Μελ Ετητης)