Wikipedia:Rollback feature Information & Wikipedia:Rollback feature Links at HealthHaven.com

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The rollback feature is a fast method of undoing blatantly unproductive edits, such as vandalism and nonsense. The name derives from the data management term rollback, meaning an operation that reverses the effect of changes made to a database.

Rollback is available automatically to all 1,704 Wikipedia administrators and the 3,104 users with the rollbacker permission. In total, 4,808 editors have rollback rights.

How it works

Rollback is available within recent change lists, page histories, diffs, and user contribution pages. When an admin or rollbacker sees an obviously inappropriate change (usually vandalism), it only takes one click (on the "rollback" link) to revert the changes. However, take care! Unlike the undo feature:

Rollback affects the latest edits to the page. You cannot pick an older edit from the page history.
If the last editor made multiple edits, they will all be reverted, to the last page version by another user. (Thus rollback is not available if a page only ever had one editor.)
Rollback happens immediately. There is no confirmation or preview before the action.

The automatic edit summary looks like this:

m Reverted edits by User A (talk) to last version by User B

Because the feature is used mostly to revert vandalism, links to the reverted user's contributions and talk pages are included to check for other bad edits, and/or issue warnings to that user.

Rollback always signals itself as a "minor edit", hence the bold "m" at the beginning.

When to use rollback

Rollback should be used only for reverts that are self-explanatory – such as removing obvious vandalism – to revert content in your own user space – or to revert edits by banned users who are not allowed to edit.

Provided that an explanation is supplied in an appropriate location, such as at the relevant talk page, rollback may also be used in circumstances where widely spread edits (by a misguided editor or malfunctioning bot) are judged to be unhelpful to the encyclopedia, since such edits would be tedious to revert manually.^[1]

However, reversion for other reasons requires an appropriate explanatory edit summary; unless this requirement is met by using tools that allow for different edit summaries, rollback would not be the appropriate method of reversion in those circumstances.

Rollback must, therefore, always be used with care. Although rollback is significantly faster and uses less bandwidth than other methods of reversion, do not worry about performance. When using rollback to restore text to a page, ensure that the text restored does not violate Wikipedia policies. When in doubt, use another method of reversion and supply an edit summary to explain your reasoning.

When not to use rollback

If there is any doubt about whether to revert an edit, 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. Because administrators have rollback automatically, it cannot be removed without removing their administrator access.

Mass rollbacks

Rollbacks may be used, with caution, if a large number of non-vandalism reverts need to be carried out (for instance, if a discussion agreed that a set of edits by an editor or bot need to be undone). In such circumstances, an explanation must be provided at the appropriate venue, such as at a relevant talk page. Alternatively, scripts that allow for custom edit summaries may be used, with caution (for instance, User:John254/mass rollback.js permits all rollback links currently viewable in a user's contributions history to be rolled back with a single click).

Custom edit summaries

Tools are available to specify custom edit summaries with rollback. Two examples are User:Gracenotes/rollback.js and User:Mr.Z-man/rollbackSummary.js. A similar tool that prompts for a summary is User:Ilmari Karonen/rollbacksummary.js. Custom edit summaries help other editors when reviewing changes.

Two extra scripts with the rollback summary shown by default are at User:Porchcrop/Rollback Summary.

To provide a custom edit summary manually, copy the rollback link, and append the URL parameter "&summary=summary".

Rollback and Twinkle

Example diff showing both Twinkle (top line) and rollback (third line)

Editors may have both rollback and the anti-vandalism tool Twinkle, and will see both types of rollback link. Editors can use either feature, though plain rollback is faster. Twinkle has the advantage of allowing an extra comment for the edit summary (except for "rollback (VANDAL)"), and in its default settings, it will automatically watch the reverted page and open the user's talk page for giving warnings.

How to apply

Editors may ask any administrator; however, administrators found in Category:Wikipedia administrators willing to grant rollback requests have specifically indicated their willingness to consider such requests. Alternatively, you may file a request at Wikipedia:Requests for permissions/Rollback.

An administrator can grant (or revoke) rollback using their own judgment, via the interface at Special:UserRights.

Practicing

To practice with rollback 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, non-administrator rollback was implemented on 9 January 2008 as noted at bug 12534, and began to be granted the same day.

Notes

^ See also Wikipedia:Requests_for_arbitration/Ryulong#Rollback.

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