On 1/4/08, phoebe ayers phoebe.wiki@gmail.com wrote:
On Jan 3, 2008 7:13 PM, doc doc.wikipedia@ntlworld.com wrote:
Old hands will remember the perennial proposal to grant non-admins rollback facilities. We polled on this for 6 months in 2006, 500 people voiced an opinion and we got no consensus.
Well, it's back http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Non_administrator_rollback
ZOMG drama indeed.... but as to the substance of this proposal, I thought that particular perennial proposal more or less went away when the "undo" button was instituted on diffs? Hmm, apparently not.
As far as I can tell, the differences between rollback and undo are that a) rollback shows up in the page history and user contribution histories as well as diffs; b) rollback doesn't require you to hit "save" a second time; c) rollback is easier to make mistakes with because you can undo more than one diff at a time (i.e. everything by an author). Am I missing anything?
Well, it is not clear to me that rolling back only one diff at a time causes less mistakes.
If you look at the article [[Confucius]] on the english wikipedia, there is a long patch there where various anon editors made minor punctuation edits and linking changes etc. which it was very hard to see as vandalism except in aggregation. The whole thing there was made a lot hairier by some script reversion chaps who would only revert a single edit, but leaving the previous subtle miss-edit by the same IP unchanged. And in the end the history of the page became such a morass of IPs doing multiple subtle vandalism edits in a row, and a script riding vandalism hunter only referting the very last one of those, I in the end saw that the simplest way to correct the whole mess was to simply revert back to my own version of 37 revisions ago. (I did look through each edit to note that none of the edits, by either anons, or the single edit reversion scripts added anything of even arguable value to the article).
-- Jussi-Ville Heiskanen, ~ [[User:Cimon Avaro]]