Maryana,

Undo and revert are specific actions. Undo does do the thing that i described, but it is more of a power user feature and what I'm hearing is that in practice undo is typically just used for the most recent edit which basically makes it the same as rollback except that rollback isn't offered to everyone and rollback is a one step process.

The difference between an edit and a revision is that the edit is actual atomic change, while the revision is the version of the document at the time of that change. I think on desktop we've been conditioned to think about them the same because we can display so much data, but on mobile displaying both edits and revisions together is quite challenging. 

But the point is well taken that the most important use case is: The most recent change from the watchlist with a quick revert/rollback/undo functionality. We don't need to worry too much about reverting to versions from a long time ago, or complicated undo procedures for specific edits in the middle of a stream of edits.

Design: Maybe that means that in Watchlist we highlight the most recent changes somehow (maybe grouped by user) and then make rollback/undo only available for those changes for now. Same thing on article history page. This seams like a reasonable MVP.

Kenan


On Fri, Apr 4, 2014 at 5:18 PM, James Alexander <jalexander@wikimedia.org> wrote:

On Fri, Apr 4, 2014 at 5:03 PM, Maryana Pinchuk <mpinchuk@wikimedia.org> wrote:

> 2) Rollback - this is when you take all of the edits of the last user and
> revert to the revision before those edits. The purpose of this is when there
> is a user that has been committing vandalism you can quickly rollback those
> edits. This is a one step process because it just does the revert and saves
> automatically.
>
> note 1: generally speaking vandalism gets caught quickly and is often the
> most recent or most recent set of edie by a single user i.e. the situation
> that rollback is designed for

Well, not really. Rollback is designed for the rarer use-case of the
persistent vandal who makes a bunch of bad edits to a page. But most
edits that are reverted are first-time test edits/light vandalism of
the clueless newbie variety, which is usually just the one most recent
edit.


To be fair rollback is actually much more common then that. While it shines the most in the multi edit scenario it's most often used in the single edit variety as well and is actually required for normal huggle usage. This is because it's all one action and is significantly faster then a manual 'click undo' (which requires you to go through extra steps).  When I was heavily involved in anti vandal/abuse fighting rollback was 'the' revert compared to the manual undo which people did for a while to get trusted enough to use gain the rollback right. (there are a couple reasons you needed to be trusted but one of the biggest ones is exactly because you can do reverts so quickly without an extra confirmation page).

James



James Alexander
Legal and Community Advocacy
Wikimedia Foundation
 




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Kenan Wang
Product Manager, Mobile
Wikimedia Foundation