Wikibooks:Rollback
From Wikibooks, the open-content textbooks collection
Contents |
[edit] When to revert
[edit] Dos
- Rollback is to be used only for vandalism, or reverting yourself. Any other use is misuse.
- If you are not sure whether a revert is appropriate, discuss it first rather than immediately reverting or deleting.
- If you feel the edit is unsatisfactory, improve it if possible. Improving may entail factual or grammatical corrections, or style changes such as trimming verbosity. If the material is too nonsensical, trivial, or poorly written to be improved, you may need to revert it completely.
[edit] Don'ts
- Do not simply revert changes that are made as part of a dispute. Be respectful to other editors, their contributions and their points of view and Assume good faith.
- If the edit you are considering reverting can instead be improved (for example, for better readability, or to re-phrase in a more NPOV way), then reword, don't revert.
[edit] Rollback
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Per bugzilla:14263, you will now be shown the diff of your rollback on the success page. |
Admins and users who have been granted access to the tool have additional "rollback" links, which:
- appear only next to the top edit
- revert all top consequent edits made by last editor (edits all in a row by the same editor, starting from the most recent revision)
- work immediately, without any further confirmation
- add an automatic edit summary "Reverted edits by Example (talk) to last version by Example2", marking the revert as minor
Rollback links appear on the User contributions pages, Diff pages, and History pages. Note that in the case of diff and contribution pages, the rollback link can be misleading. On diff pages, reversion is not necessarily to the old version shown (the diff page may show the combined result of edits including some by other editors, or only part of the edits the rollback button would revert). To see the changes the rollback button would revert, view the corresponding diff page (which shows the difference between the top edit and the latest revision by a different user). On contribution pages, you're not able to tell whether several edits to a single page are consequent (there may be edits by other users interspersed), though the timestamps are often telling. Again, check the page history to see the edits that will be reverted.
Rollback works much quicker than undo, since it
- Allows reverting without even looking at the list of revisions or a diff
- Does not require loading an edit page and sending the wikitext back to the server
- Does not require a click of the save button
On the other hand, it is not as versatile as undo, since it does not allow to specify which edits have to be undone (one may want to revert more or less edits than rollback does, or edits which do not include the last edit) and does not allow adding an explanation to the automatic edit summary. It is technically possible to specify a custom edit summary by appending &summary=your_edit_summary to the URL, but this is not normally done.
Rollback is supposed to be used to revert obvious vandalism. Rolling back a good-faith edit without explanation may be misinterpreted as "I think your edit was no better than vandalism and reverting it doesn't need an explanation." Some editors are sensitive to such perceived slights; if you use the rollback feature other than for vandalism (for example because undo is impractical due to the large page size), it's polite to leave an explanation on the article talk page or on the talk page of the user whose edit(s) you reverted.
If someone else edited or rolled back the page before you click the "rollback" link, you will get an error message. You will also get an error message if there was no previous editor; in this case, you may want to tag a page for deletion with {{delete|vandalism page}}
[edit] Bot rollback (Administrators only)
In cases of flood vandalism, Administrators (but not rollbackers) may choose to hide vandalism from recent changes. To do this, append &bot=1 to the end of the URL for a user's contributions. For example, http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Special:Contributions?target=Willy_on_wheels&bot=1.
When the rollback links on the reloaded contributions page are clicked, the revert and the original vandalistic edit that you are reverting will both be hidden from recent changes by marking them as bot edits. They can be seen in recent changes by clicking the "show bots" link to set &hidebots=0. The edits are not hidden from contributions lists, page histories or watchlists (depending on users' preferences). The edits remain in the database and are not removed, but they no longer flood recent changes. The aim of this feature is to reduce the annoyance factor of a flood vandal with relatively little effort.
