I notice that recently there is a new "undo" link appearing when viewing old diffs. Strangely, it only appears for diffs other than the latest one. It looks like what it does is let you remove text that was introduced in an old revision but subsequently "consolidated" by a later edit. I have two questions about it:
1) Is there any documentation on it, and if so, could that be linked to from the text that says "The edit was successfully undone. Please click save to apply this change." (and also from the error message you get when it can't undo due to intervening edits)
2) What's the rationale behind not making it available for the latest edit? Presumably this is a political sensitivity about not giving rollback to everyone, but it's a bit odd to effectively give rollback for old edits, rather than for all edits, which would be much more useful. Could we perhaps trial "rollback for everyone"?
Steve
Steve Bennett wrote:
I notice that recently there is a new "undo" link appearing when viewing old diffs. Strangely, it only appears for diffs other than the latest one. It looks like what it does is let you remove text that was introduced in an old revision but subsequently "consolidated" by a later edit. I have two questions about it:
- Is there any documentation on it, and if so, could that be linked
to from the text that says "The edit was successfully undone. Please click save to apply this change." (and also from the error message you get when it can't undo due to intervening edits)
Raimond Spekking wrote:
werdna@svn.wikimedia.org schrieb:
Revision: 17935 Author: werdna Date: 2006-11-26 02:54:01 -0800 (Sun, 26 Nov 2006)
Log Message:
- (bug 6295) Add a 'revision patching' functionality, where an edit
can be undone (with a functionality similar to diff rev1 rev2 | patch -R rev3 -o rev3). This is triggered by including &undo=revid in an edit URL. A link to a URL that will undo a given edit is shown on NEW NON-CURRENT revision headers on diff pages.
It's bug 6925.
So if Bugzilla was working...
- What's the rationale behind not making it available for the latest
edit? Presumably this is a political sensitivity about not giving rollback to everyone, but it's a bit odd to effectively give rollback for old edits, rather than for all edits, which would be much more useful. Could we perhaps trial "rollback for everyone"?
Possibly.
On 05/12/06, Steve Bennett stevagewp@gmail.com wrote:
- Is there any documentation on it, and if so, could that be linked
to from the text that says "The edit was successfully undone. Please click save to apply this change." (and also from the error message you get when it can't undo due to intervening edits)
Ask the developer (Werdna) who implemented the feature. Like all good developers, I am 100% confident he added a little documentation somewhere on MediaWiki.org. If not, then I'm sure some bright spark would be able to work out how the thing works, and provide some.
- What's the rationale behind not making it available for the latest
edit? Presumably this is a political sensitivity about not giving rollback to everyone, but it's a bit odd to effectively give rollback for old edits, rather than for all edits, which would be much more useful. Could we perhaps trial "rollback for everyone"?
If it's the latest edit, than a (more expensive) undo operation is not needed; a manual revert would have the same effect, or a rollback would undo the series of edits. So in short, the rollback feature is more appropriate in those cases.
The moment people suggest trialling rollback for everyone (where everyone, I usually hope, means all autoconfirmed users), a Holy War starts.
Rob Church
On 12/5/06, Rob Church robchur@gmail.com wrote:
Ask the developer (Werdna) who implemented the feature. Like all good developers, I am 100% confident he added a little documentation somewhere on MediaWiki.org. If not, then I'm sure some bright spark would be able to work out how the thing works, and provide some.
Should I have posted to mediawiki-l instead?
If it's the latest edit, than a (more expensive) undo operation is not needed; a manual revert would have the same effect, or a rollback would undo the series of edits. So in short, the rollback feature is more appropriate in those cases.
The moment people suggest trialling rollback for everyone (where everyone, I usually hope, means all autoconfirmed users), a Holy War starts.
Yes, this is clearly the weird sort of situation that arises when politics meets technology.
Q1) What is "undo"? A) Rollback for any revision.
Q2) Why doesn't it show up for the current revision? A) Because "rollback" is more efficient for that case.
Q3) So I should use rollback instead? A) No, because only admins are allowed to rollback stuff.
Q4) So I should use undo instead? A) No, see Q2.
Steve
On 05/12/06, Steve Bennett stevagewp@gmail.com wrote:
Should I have posted to mediawiki-l instead?
No.
I'd support adding a "dumb" undo link for current revisions that links to the edit page for the previous revision...at least, for non administrators. Rollback should probably take precedence when it's available.
Rob Church
On 12/6/06, Rob Church robchur@gmail.com wrote:
I'd support adding a "dumb" undo link for current revisions that links to the edit page for the previous revision...at least, for non administrators. Rollback should probably take precedence when it's available.
Yay.
Steve
Ummm....how is that diferant than rollback? ----- Original Message ----- From: "Steve Bennett" stevagewp@gmail.com To: "Wikimedia developers" wikitech-l@wikimedia.org Sent: Tuesday, December 05, 2006 5:05 PM Subject: Re: [Wikitech-l] What does the "undo" link do?
On 12/6/06, Rob Church robchur@gmail.com wrote:
I'd support adding a "dumb" undo link for current revisions that links to the edit page for the previous revision...at least, for non administrators. Rollback should probably take precedence when it's available.
Yay.
Steve _______________________________________________ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@wikimedia.org http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
On 07/12/06, xaosflux xaosflux@gmail.com wrote:
Ummm....how is that diferant than rollback?
Because rollback isn't a straightforward revert, despite looking like one in a lot of cases.
Rob Church
Rob Church wrote:
On 07/12/06, xaosflux xaosflux@gmail.com wrote:
Ummm....how is that diferant than rollback?
Because rollback isn't a straightforward revert, despite looking like one in a lot of cases.
Internally, rollback has special magical powers involving wikimagicpixiedust, and must be kept out of the hands of the unwashed masses.
On 12/6/06, Alphax (Wikipedia email) alphasigmax@gmail.com wrote:
Rob Church wrote:
On 07/12/06, xaosflux xaosflux@gmail.com wrote:
Ummm....how is that diferant than rollback?
Because rollback isn't a straightforward revert, despite looking like one in a lot of cases.
Internally, rollback has special magical powers involving wikimagicpixiedust, and must be kept out of the hands of the unwashed masses.
And more seriously, you have to load an extra two pages to undo, in fact exactly the same number of pages as for a manual revert, plus you get to enter an edit summary. This makes it less well suited for abuse, at least in theory.
On 12/7/06, Simetrical Simetrical+wikitech@gmail.com wrote:
And more seriously, you have to load an extra two pages to undo, in fact exactly the same number of pages as for a manual revert, plus you get to enter an edit summary. This makes it less well suited for abuse, at least in theory.
Perhaps we could even encourage admins to use undo rather than revert in a number of situations where the reason for their reversion is not absolutely crystal clear. Reverting anything other than clear-cut vandalism carries an unpleasant odour...
Steve
On 12/7/06, Steve Bennett stevagewp@gmail.com wrote:
Perhaps we could even encourage admins to use undo rather than revert in a number of situations where the reason for their reversion is not absolutely crystal clear. Reverting anything other than clear-cut vandalism carries an unpleasant odour...
Replace "revert" with "rollback".
Steve
2006/12/7, xaosflux xaosflux@gmail.com:
Ummm....how is that diferant than rollback?
Rollback is one click and the edit is rolled back. Undo takes you to an edit screen that *when saved without changes* rolls back the edit.
On 07/12/06, Andre Engels andreengels@gmail.com wrote:
Rollback is one click and the edit is rolled back. Undo takes you to an edit screen that *when saved without changes* rolls back the edit.
As I've mentioned before in this thread, that isn't the whole case; rollback *will* revert more than one edit where there's a sequence of edits by the same contributor.
In that respect, it's much more powerful.
Rob Church
On 12/8/06, Rob Church robchur@gmail.com wrote:
As I've mentioned before in this thread, that isn't the whole case; rollback *will* revert more than one edit where there's a sequence of edits by the same contributor.
In that respect, it's much more powerful.
Ok, given that "undo" is not "rollback", and that "undo" is more user-friendly than "manual revert", can "undo" be enabled for all users for the most recent revision? And we'll keep calling it "undo" and insist that it's totally different from "rollback" and everyone will be happy, right?
Steve
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Steve Bennett wrote:
On 12/8/06, Rob Church robchur@gmail.com wrote:
As I've mentioned before in this thread, that isn't the whole case; rollback *will* revert more than one edit where there's a sequence of edits by the same contributor.
In that respect, it's much more powerful.
Ok, given that "undo" is not "rollback", and that "undo" is more user-friendly than "manual revert", can "undo" be enabled for all users for the most recent revision? And we'll keep calling it "undo" and insist that it's totally different from "rollback" and everyone will be happy, right?
I don't see a particular reason not to show it; it would just be the same as clicking 'edit' on the previous revision. :)
- -- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
2006/12/5, Steve Bennett stevagewp@gmail.com:
- What's the rationale behind not making it available for the latest
edit?
For the latest edit, it is not needed, because you get exactly the same behaviour from the "edit this page" link.
2006/12/5, Andre Engels andreengels@gmail.com:
2006/12/5, Steve Bennett stevagewp@gmail.com:
- What's the rationale behind not making it available for the latest
edit?
For the latest edit, it is not needed, because you get exactly the same behaviour from the "edit this page" link.
I submitted that too fast... What I meant was:
... you get exactly the same behaviour from the "edit" link next to the revision date.
On 12/5/06, Andre Engels andreengels@gmail.com wrote:
2006/12/5, Steve Bennett stevagewp@gmail.com: For the latest edit, it is not needed, because you get exactly the same behaviour from the "edit this page" link.
That's an even bizarrer rationale. Making GUI behaviour inconsistent to avoid perceived redundancies in specific cases?? It would be like making Alt+F4 not work on any application that had a File|Exit menu....
Selecting "undo" on the latest revision is a hell of a lot more intuitive than having to find the prevision revision and selecting "edit" on that. And less error prone - it's not that easy to be sure that you have the penultimate revision. Take this example: http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Foo&diff=88844959&oldid=76...
If I click on the "edit" link on the left hand side, exactly how many revisions am I rolling back? This isn't indicated anywhere in the GUI...
Steve
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