Last modified: 2011-03-13 18:05:14 UTC
It would sometimes be useful to be able to revert back to a specific version, without viewing the version, Edit'ing it, and saving. In particular, it would be useful to know in the database that such an edit was a reversion; for statistical purposes, and to retain the option of one day storing only a single copy of the content. This could be a link from the history page.
But not only for Admins. At least a "Revert last Version" would be helpfull for anybody in the combat against WikiSpam and vandalism. I estimate that removing Spam from a page would be 10 times faster as with the current technique where both versions need to be opened and original need to be copied from the old version.
Created attachment 4812 [details] Patch to create action=revisionrevert Adds new functions to revert to a specified revision of a page. Links on page history, diffs, and when viewing old revisions. Assigns the right to use it to sysops by default.
Created attachment 4813 [details] Slight fix to previosu patch
Created attachment 4816 [details] Better patch Now prompts for a summary and gives the option to mark the edit as minor before submitting the change (less damage if we click the link by accident) The form can be bypassed by setting &skip=1 in the URL (and &wpMinoredit=1 if desired). Leaving the summary field blank on submit uses the default summary. Also shows a diff of the changes below the form.
I'm really not sure this is worth the interface clutter. What are the actual use-cases? You would have to know that *all* subsequent edits were bad. In typical cases this would only be the case if you saw that the top editor vandalized the page, in which case you can assume that the whole string of edits was vandalism, and that's what the rollback button is for. If the cases where this would be useful are rare, it deserves to be a two- or three-click operation as it is at present. It should not be a button on the page history. And once you get to the diff/old revision page, you can already click the edit button and get the same number of clicks. It saves bytes sent, but for human readers that's usually not an issue. The API may want to support some operation like this (once it supports edits altogether), but I'm pretty skeptical about the utility of a button.
Actually, in my time administering a number of wiki over at Wikia I've found a number of times it would be nice to have this kind of button. The primary two I can think of: ;Mass vandalism attacks by multiple proxies/users: I've had to deal with a number of mass attacks, and once you have a case where Vandal A edits, then Vandal B adds more vandalism (and yes, this does happen) you lose the ability to simply rollback the vandalism. You know that all the revisions past something are bad, however you cannot simply rollback. And trust me, undoing 100+ edits of page vandalism where you need to manually edit a revision then save to be able to revert, that is not pretty or fun when on anything less than a dual-core computer. ;Admins/Users who try to undo, but miss vandalism: In my common day-to-day monitoring of the Narutopedia, I see a number of other users and even an admin, who do try to help revert vandalism. However, there are a lot of cases where they go and just use the undo button, unfortunately, undo does not work to revert the full thing when the vandal edits with 2 or 3 revisions like they commonly do on the wiki. So then I have to go and do the manual revert myself to complete the revert. And trust me, having to submit a form, after clicking a link (2pages instead of 1), even that isn't nice on a p4 when you have to monitor and handle a large number of changes in the RC.
This still would probably be better handled for power-users with a custom script, rather than Yet Another Button, IMO.
*** Bug 10831 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
Closing per #7
