[WikiEN-l] A six-day roll-back poll?

[Chris Howie]

On Jan 4, 2008 2:28 PM, phoebe ayers <phoebe.wiki at gmail.com> wrote:

> On Jan 3, 2008 7:13 PM, doc <doc.wikipedia at 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?
>
> -- phoebe
>

No to point A (rollback and undo both show up in contributions/history, just
like every other edit, I'm 95% sure of this).  Yes to point B.  No to point
C (you can undo multiple edits too by viewing a diff page that has unshown
intermediate diffs).  AFAIK all that "undo" does is act like you clicked the
"edit" link on the older diff displayed and fills in a default edit summary.

Also AFAIK, "rollback" is special in only a few ways:

1. The edit summary is filled automatically and cannot be changed.

2. It does not require two page loads, only one.

3. It fails if the document was edited since you loaded the diff.

Considering point 3, rollback is actually a bit safer than undo.  (In my
experience, conflict detection when editing from an old revision can be
flaky.)

Disclaimer: This is all based on observation during countless RC patrol
sessions and (though I am a PHP hacker) not through examination of the
MediaWiki sources.

-- 
Chris Howie
http://www.chrishowie.com
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Crazycomputers