User talk:166.84.167.31

My Username

I, DanBron, don't own this IP, but am responsible for at least some of the edits made under it. See my user page for other IPs which may represent me. @SIG@

Apples

I like your "how apples fall" edit and hope it will stick.

-- AvB ÷ talk 21:24, 20 June 2007 (UTC)[reply]

September 2007: Edit to Middle Ages

Did you really intend the edit you made to Middle Ages? (I'm referring to this edit.) Did you undo the wrong edit by mistake? If you did it intentionally... please don't.

At any rate, I've fixed it now. -- Why Not A Duck 18:54, 4 September 2007 (UTC)[reply]

(I replied on his talk page)

Okay, I sort of have your mistake figured out. In these two edits someone added a bunch of garbage. Then in the next two edits a couple of other people cleaned it up, completely. The last of those probably came between when you saw the garbage, and when you tried fixing it. So when you "undid" that last revision, it actually put the garbage back.

Here're the things I do, to avoid such a mistake:

When I see something wrong on a page, I click the "history" link to see the recent changes.
Then I check the last few edits, to see if they're vandalism or cleanup or what. I use the "compare selected versions" button to do that. Often, somebody cleans up vandalism but doesn't catch all of it.
When I go to make the edit, I use the "show changes" button on the edit page, to see what I'd be changing and make sure it's what I had in mind.
That "Show preview" button can also be handy. It lets you look over the page, as it would be after you save your change. I don't use it much when reverting vandalism, it's more useful for real content edits, but it's there.

And there's another way to do a revert, other than the "undo" button. You'll notice in the "history" page, just to the right of the radio buttons, the date of each edit. That's a link; if you click on it it'll take you to that particular past version of the article. If you click on that, and then click on edit, you can save the page the way it used to be. That's more complicated than the undo button, and has its own gotchas (it'll clobber all changes made after the one in question, no matter how many there are) but the advantage is that if you can find a "truly good version" in the history you can go back to it. It's useful when several different vandals scribble all over each other, or when somebody makes a mistake in fixing vandalism.

Good luck! -- Why Not A Duck 20:47, 4 September 2007 (UTC)[reply]

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