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
(415) 839-6885 x6716 @jamesofur