[Mediawiki-l] no rollback with only one author?!

[Brion Vibber]

Sam Rowe wrote:
> On Mon, Jun 13, 2005 at 02:01:44PM -0700, Brion Vibber wrote:
> # Sam Rowe wrote:
> # >Sorry if this is in the archives. It just bit me in a huge way. We
> # >maintain a MediaWiki for internal documentation which means that
> # >usually one or two people "own" a document (meaning that they're
> # >the only ones who contribute to it.) What's the rationale behind not
> # >allowing a roll-back if there's been only one author?
> #
> # There's no prior version to roll-back *to* if there's been only one author.
>
> Seems like if MediaWiki can show me a diff of the changes, it can
> roll back. What am I missing?

I think you've misunderstood what rollback does and what it's for.

Rollback is an anti-vandalism shortcut tool which returns the article to
the state it was left in by the last person to edit it *before* the most
recent user who edited it.

If history looks like this:

   4:34 Bob       'v4n4l1z3d!!!!'
   4:30 Bob       '1 0wnz3d j00000'
   3:13 127.0.0.1 '+interwiki'
   2:33 127.0.0.1 'spelling'
   2:30 Smith     'wikify'
   1:10 Fred      'stub'

If you hit 'rollback', the system skips back over all of Bob's edits,
grabs the text of the 3:13 edit by 127.0.0.1 and saves a new edit with
that text:

   4:45 WikiSysop 'Reverted to last edit by 127.0.0.1'

Now let's take the case of an article that's only ever been edited by Bob:

   4:35 Bob       'v4n4l1z3d!!!!'
   4:29 Bob       '1 0wnz3d j00000'

There is no previous edit to roll back to; the entire history is by the
vandal, Bob. As a sysop cleaning up vandalism, you can either blank the
page or just delete it, but rollback can't do that for you as it's not
its job to decide what to do in that case.

It sounds like rollback is completely inappropriate for what you're
doing; if you just want to revert a page to a particular previous
revision, load it up from history, hit 'edit', and save it with an
appropriate summary comment.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
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