Wikipedia:Rollback

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This page documents an English Wikipedia guideline. It is a generally accepted standard that editors should follow, though it should be treated with common sense and the occasional exception. When editing this page, please ensure that your revision reflects consensus. When in doubt, discuss your idea on the talk page.

Shortcuts: WP:BROOM WP:RBK WP:ROLLBACK WP:SQUEEGEE

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 . The current count is 2,121 users with rollback privileges. Rollback is also available to administrators listed on .

1 When to use rollback
2 When not to use Rollback
3 How it works
4 Benefits of the Rollback feature
5 Mass rollbacks
6 Custom edit summaries
7 How to apply for rollback
8 Practicing with the rollback tool
9 History
10 See also

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. 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 roll back 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 revision), though in general, we should not worry about performance.

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.