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I just made an edit and saved it without giving it an edit summary. The default summary was

added 24 characters in body

I made another edit to the same post within 5 minutes, this time changing the automatic edit summary, however, when I viewed the edit, the original automatic summary remained.

I suggest that we be allowed to edit the summary while we're within 5 minutes of posting the edit.

It has been suggested that users can make two edits to change the summary: the first by making a superfluous change, the second by undoing the change and changing the summary at the same time. This is counterintuitive and surprising behaviour. A user only has 5 minutes to change an edit before it becomes a new edit, and in that period they should be able to do anything they could have done on the first edit.

This feature was first suggested in early 2011 and was very popular, yet was never done. If the reason it hasn't been implemented is to avoid trivial edits, then the workaround (which didn't work for me) simply doubles the number of trivial edits needed to get the job done.

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  • 3
    You need to change something in the post body to get the edit summary overwritten.
    – Tom
    Commented Nov 5, 2019 at 0:01
  • @Tom Not true. I did edit the post body. And anyway, I don't see why that should be a restriction.
    – Cool Fool
    Commented Nov 5, 2019 at 0:02
  • 1
    enter a space somewhere
    – anki
    Commented Nov 5, 2019 at 0:56
  • @ankii Assuming that editing the post allows editing the summary, that's a non-obvious workaround that most users won't know. Simply allow users to use the site as they already expect it to work.
    – Cool Fool
    Commented Nov 5, 2019 at 0:58
  • I think everyone below 2k writes genuine edit summary or sometimes uses the cached ones. For those above 2k ,which you are on ~5 sites, that is easy to guess after one incident. Also, Where else do you see such behaviour to expect something out of it ?
    – anki
    Commented Nov 5, 2019 at 1:00
  • @ankii I'm not just asking for myself, I'm asking for all users who could get caught out by thinking they can edit the summary as the UI implies they can. Let's use the principle of least surprise. Also, users (particularly me) aren't perfect and can't act perfectly every time. Don't make it hard for people to correct their mistakes!
    – Cool Fool
    Commented Nov 5, 2019 at 1:08

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