User:Ritchie333/For gawd's sake, use edit summaries

Nobody brought a map, and nobody can remember whether we turned left or right, let alone why, and now we're lost in the middle of nowhere.....

I've got to be honest - I get sick to the back teeth of editors who don't leave an edit summary.

Wikipedia is a collaborative project. Lots of people edit articles all over the place, and the end result is a by-product of everyone working together. Some changes are great, some are not so good, and some are in the middle. Many editors just make their edit and move on, but some of the more experienced old-timers keep articles on their watchlist so they can check edits from others are a net-positive improvement to the article. Life is made much easier if these edits have edit summaries attached to them.

There's an old saying that goes something along the lines of "Write every commit message like the next person who reads it is an axe-wielding maniac who knows where you live". If I'm looking through a corpus of edits on an article I haven't looked at for a while, and trying to merge an old version against the current one to get a better revision, and you give me no clues to what you were thinking, I won't be able to tell, and that'll just irritate me. (Yes, I know about WP:CIVIL, but that just tells you what you can't say, not what you can't think). In addition, since edits are stored forever (well, most of the time), summaries are a useful hint to remind you what you were doing on that article over there five years ago, that you've completely forgotten about. Don't rely on your memory - it doesn't work! I've even seen adminship requests run into trouble because of a lack of edit summaries; as we have tools to easily produce summary stats, it's easy to find out.

Please note, I'm not saying that an edit from a throwaway IP with no edit summary is always a net-negative. It isn't. However, if I've got to take five minutes out to work out what the change was and guess why it was done, the edit runs the risk of me mistaking it for a non-improvement and reverting it. Explain thyself.