Wikipedia:Avoid using preview button
 | This page is intended as humor. It is not, has never been, nor will ever be, a Wikipedia policy or guideline. Rather, it illustrates standards or conduct that are generally not accepted by the Wikipedia community. |
- This page is created as a humorous complement to Wikipedia:Avoid using wikilinks.
Show preview
The preview button. Don’t click!
Preview button (shown on the left) is sometimes used to preview edits before saving them. This is wrong, evil and politically incorrect for several reasons:
- If your computer crashes, all your work will be lost.
- You won't have as many edits, and therefore, you are less likely to become an administrator of Wikipedia.
- Servers cannot handle the load of generating pages that do not even exist yet.
- If your typo causes a link to go red, that will cause people to realise that they should probably create a redirect to the real page. Since if you have misspelled it, somebody else might do so too.
- All that time spent will result in you getting an edit conflict, causing work lost and further headache.
Alternatives
edit- Parse all the text in your head, if you would like to see how it would look.
- Publish the page (marking the edit minor). If the outcome is undesirable, edit again. If you like it, edit again, making a small change and apologising for marking a major edit as minor.
- Make a private sandbox.
- Use VisualEditor to edit.