allow option for requiring description when editing page. This is so if a commit to an rcs is used, the commit message will not be blank.

Duplicate of Allow web edit form comment field to be mandatory where Joey indicated that he didn't want this in ikiwiki core, but would accept a plugin that did it.

Expanding on what Joey said there a little, the problem I have with requiring a commit message is that solving a social problem by technical means rarely works. If you can't persuade users to obey a policy like "provide a nonempty commit message", then you can't persuade them to obey a policy like "provide a useful nonempty commit message" either. I used to work on a project whose Bugzilla had been configured or patched to require a comment whenever you changed a field (e.g. priority, cc, ...) and in practice that just led to a lot of wasted time when people tried to triage bugs quickly, and a lot of comments whose text was ".", " ", or on at least one occasion, ☃ (U+2603 SNOWMAN).

If your chosen RCS has a technical constraint that the commit message must be non-empty (and will just not work otherwise), that's another matter; I'd say that in that situation it's appropriate for its plugin to replace empty commit messages with "." or gettext("update") or something. --smcv