Wikipedia:Administrators' guide/Rollback

Grab one and start erasing! Be careful what you erase, though...

Additional relevant information can be found at Help:Reverting#Advanced features.

As an admin, you may spend much of your time reverting changes made to an article page. You may be familiar with the undo feature, which undoes the last edit to the article. As an admin, you also have the rollback feature, to expedite the process.

• The undo feature undoes one edit.
• The rollback feature undoes all the consecutive edits made by an editor in a single article. This is handy if, for example, a user makes eight edits to an article and you want to revert all eight edits. When you click "rollback", all eight edits are undone.

Use of rollback by admins is subject to the rollback guideline, which explains when rollback can be used, when it cannot, etc. Misuse of rollback may lead to the removal of administrator privileges.

Demonstration of reverting edits using rollback

1. Go to the page you wish to use the rollback feature on. In this case, we will use Wikipedia:New admin school/Deleting/delete.
2. Add two or more edits to the page by clicking here. Use edit summaries, edit1, edit2, etc.
3. Close the tab containing the page.
4. Go to the history page.
5. Click on the blue-linked "rollback" (rollback | undo) at the right-hand side of the last edit string. This will immediately rollback the page to the version prior to your edits and post an edit summary such as, "Reverted edits by User2 (talk) to last version by User1) (rollback: 3 edits | undo)".

To see the difference between rollback and the undo tool, go back to the page history and click "undo" instead of rollback. A good discussion about the differences between rollback and undo is available at m:Help:Reverting#Rollback.

Mass rollback

The "rollback" button also appears on the "Contributions" page associated with each editor. If you have examined a number of individual edits by an editor and determined that they all deserve(d) to be removed (for example, they all consisted of inserting the same WikiSpam), you may decide to roll back all recent edits by this editor. To activate this feature, install the script available from User:John254/mass rollback.js. After installation, the option can be accessed using the "rollback" buttons on the editor's contributions page. Keep in mind that mass reversion of a user's edits should be used with caution and only when the edits are clear violations of policy.