Wikipedia:Rollbackers

Rollback is a feature of the MediaWiki software that runs Wikipedia. It allows the last user's edits on a given page to be undone with a single mouse click. On Wikipedia, rollback is used to undo problematic edits such as vandalism.

How it works

Users with rollback have extra "rollback" links next to revisions on the recent changes page, page histories, diffs, user contribution pages, and their watchlist:

• 21:49, 2 September 2010 (diff | hist) Foobar (talk | contribs) Wikipedia:Rollback feature (696,060 bytes) (this is an example) (current) [­rollback: 1 edit­]

Clicking one of these links restores the page to the most recent revision that is not made by the revision's author. This appears in the page history with a generic summary that looks like this:

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

A link to the reverted user's contribution history is provided, so that it may be easily checked for further problematic edits. It does not appear if you are reverting contributions done by a user whose username has been removed, the result being:

m Reverted edits by (username removed) to last version by User B

Note the following:

• The rollback button appears only next to the most recent revision of a page.
• If the page is edited again before you click the rollback link, you will get an error message instead.
• You cannot choose which revision will be restored. It is always the last revision not made by the author of the most recent revision. This revision may be problematic too, so be careful.
• If there are multiple consecutive edits to the page by the same author, they will all be reverted. To remove only some of them, you must revert the changes manually.
• You cannot use rollback on a page which has only been edited by one person, as there would be nothing to revert to.
• You cannot use rollback to restore a revision that has been deleted. Attempting to do so will display an error message.
• Rollback happens immediately; there is no confirmation or preview (although a page is displayed allowing you to see the changes you have made).
• Rollbacks are automatically marked as a "minor edit".

Note that methods exist for performing rollback with non-generic edit summaries – see the Additional tools section below.