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The rollback feature is available to administrators and users with the rollbacker permission on Wikipedia as a fast method of undoing edits that are blatantly nonproductive, such as vandalism and nonsense.
A complete list of users with the rollbacker permission can be found in the page Special:Listusers/rollbacker. The current count is 1,961 users with rollback privileges. Rollback is also available to administrators listed on Special:Listusers/sysop.
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When to use rollback
The 'rollback' links provided by Wikipedia's interface provide a standard edit summary of the form "Reverted edits by X to last version by Y". These should be used only to revert edits that are clearly unproductive, such as vandalism, to revert content in your own user space, or to revert edits by banned users. Reversion for other reasons should be accompanied by an explanatory edit summary, and must therefore be done by a different method.
It is possible to specify an edit summary when using rollback; however, this requires manual editing of the link's URL or use of additional software or scripts. When such tools are used, the issue of choice of reversion method is moot, and rollback may be used for any purpose, provided an explanatory edit summary is supplied.
Rollback must always be used with care. If you use rollback to restore text to a page, you are in effect still making that edit yourself, so you should take care to ensure the text does not violate any Wikipedia policies. When in doubt, manually revert to the appropriate revision and supply an edit summary to explain your reasoning.
When not to use Rollback
If there is any doubt about whether an edit should be rolled back, please do not use this feature. Use the undo feature instead, and add a more informative edit summary explaining your revert. Misuse of rollback may cause the feature to be revoked by an administrator. As rollback is automatically available to administrators, it is not possible to remove their rollback rights individually without also removing their administrator access.
How it works
The Rollback feature is available within the history page of an article, a diff and a user's contributions page. When an admin or rollbacker sees an unworthy change to an article (usually vandalism), as long as the change they wish to rollback is the latest edit to the article, they can click the 'rollback' link which will revert the vandal's edit.
If the vandal made more than one edit to the article in a row, the version reverted to will be the latest version made by a user other than the vandal. The automatically generated edit summary for rollback looks like this:
- m Reverted edits by User A (talk) to last version by User B
Where User A depicts the editor whose changes are being reverted, while User B signals the editor of the version the admin or rollbacker reverted User A's changes to. Because the feature is used mostly to revert vandalism, a link to User A's contributions and talk page is also included as an easy way to issue warnings to that user. At one time there was a link beside it to block that user, although it has since been removed.
In all cases the Rollback signals itself as a "minor edit", hence the bold "m" at the beginning.
Benefits of the Rollback feature
- Administrators and rollbackers only need to make one or two mouse-clicks to remove vandalism. Rollback is also significantly faster and uses less bandwidth than reversion by saving an edit (whether through "undo" or manually editing an old version).
Mass rollbacks
If you need to carry out a large number of non-vandalism reverts using rollback (for instance, after a discussion where it is agreed that a set of edits by an editor or bot need to be reverted), please use a script that allows custom edit summaries to be used.
Custom edit summaries
The default rollback tool has a standard edit summary. Tools are available to enable custom edit summaries to be used. Two examples of such scripts are User:Gracenotes/rollback.js and User:Mr.Z-man/rollbackSummary.js. A similar tool, but one that prompts editors for an edit summary when using rollback, is User:Ilmari Karonen/rollbacksummary.js. The use of custom edit summaries helps other editors when reviewing non-vandalism reverts.
How to apply for rollback
Any administrator can grant rollback to a user using his or her own judgement. To grant rollback, the administrator needs to go to Special:Userrights and add the rollback permission to the user's account.
You may approach any administrator and request this permission, however administrators found in Category:Wikipedia administrators willing to grant rollback requests have specifically indicated their willingness to consider such requests when approached on their talk pages (or via e-mail). Alternatively, you may file a request at Wikipedia:Requests for permissions/Rollback.
Practicing with the rollback tool
To practice with the rollback tool and see how it works, please see Wikipedia:New admin school/Rollback.
History
The rollbacker permission feature was implemented on the English-language Wikipedia following several discussions at Wikipedia:Non-administrator rollback and two major polls. Following the second poll, the feature was implemented on 9 January 2008 as noted at bug 12534, and began to be granted the same day.
See also
- Users with Rollback rights
- Help:Reverting
- Help:Undo
- Wikipedia:Requests for permissions
- Wikipedia:Vandalism
Wikipedia content modification information:
- This page was last modified on 5 October 2008, at 00:40.
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