Uh oh, look out -- it's the pedant police! :)
There are two special cases of reverting that are especially useful to users:
- Undo - this is when you want to "fix" an edit but there have been edits
since the problematic edit that were productive.
I'm not sure how you guys came to this definition, but it doesn't quite match the current existing one onwiki. Undo and revert are used interchangeably to describe the action of removing a single edit, either the latest edit to a page or earlier ones (in which case, it usually has to be done manually and is a huge pain). Because it's so much easier to do and because there's a community of users who do this almost exclusively (using terrible/fun software like Huggle), the primary use-case of "undo" is reverting the most recent edit.
Undo tries to just undo
that specific edit in question instead of reverting all the way to the revision before the edit. The reason to use undo is that sometimes there was a problematic edit but since then there have been productive edits. Specifically, what undo does is it tries to revert to the revision before the problematic edit and then computationally add back in the edits since then. Sometimes this isn't possible. Sometimes it is. When it is possible to undo automatically the user gets the revision plus the "productive edits" that occurred since the edit being undone, all of that content is populated into an edit interface and the user can make any additional edits (sometimes necessary to make the article make sense after the undo) and then save.
- 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.
note 2: undo occurs on an edit, revert and rollback operate on revisions. on desktop the list of edits and the list of revisions is the same interface but it may make sense to divide these on mobile.
I'm confused -- edits and revisions are synonymous. In both cases, we're talking about atomic changes to a single document that are stored sequentially as a version history. Am I missing something?
Thus on mobile we may have
separately a list of revisions (possibly grouped by user) that may allow reverts and rollbacks, and a list of edits that allows for unto.
We will likely prioritize revert/rollbacks because that covers the biggest use case (vandalism on articles that are changing at a moderate velocity. Also, this may have implications for how we display watchlist items: considering grouping edits by user, and only displaying most recent edits (i.e. only rollback eligible edits)
There a detailed view of revisions in addition to a list view of revisions and. We need to understand what goes into a detailed view of a revision. Maybe we show the diff to current version because this is what would be affected by a revert, actions, username, time, other details.We may want to consider changing the interaction of reverts a bit (maybe should be 2 click action instead of putting user into edit).
Let me know if I missed anything.
If I may offer my 2 cents now, since I was unable to attend this meeting: I think you guys are overcomplicating things a bit. It's almost like you've been talking to Wikipedians about this ;)
From a 10,000 foot perspective, here's what happens on desktop Wikipedia today:
1) Clueless newbie wanders into an article, mashes some keys, and hits save 2) Some editor is watching that article, sees the diff of the stupid edit, and reverts it
OR
3) Some reader/editor is reading the article, sees the stupid edit, and manually edits the dumb thing out
AND, LATER THAT NIGHT
4) Some Huggler loads up the 10,000 latest revisions and reverts them all back in about an hour.
What it feels like you need on mobile is one or both of these:
a) a way to revert edits from your watchlist diff view if they're the most recent revision b) an edit button c) a mobile Recent Changes first-person shooter game (basically, Huggle for mobile)
You've already got b. and c. is kind of evil, imho. So I think maybe just focus on building a really lightweight way to accomplish a.? Getting into the complexity of article histories and rollback is going to be a ton of work to support an extremely rare user need, and frankly just not worth the time/hassle.