Wikipedia:New admin school/Rollback

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

Part Most All of your time as an admin may be spent reverting changes made to an article page. You may be used to the undo feature where you can undo the last edit to the article. As an admin, you additionally have a rollback feature to expedite the process. Where the undo feature lets you undo one edit, the rollback feature lets you undo all the consecutive edits made by an editor. This is handy, for example, if an IP posts eight edits to an article and you want to revert all eight edits. Simply hit rollback and all eight edits will be undone.

Conventionally, administrative rollback is only used to revert simple vandalism or large amounts of mistaken edits (such as when a bot malfunctions). Using rollback to revert conventional good-faith edits is frowned upon because it leaves no useful message to the editor you are reverting and implies you thought their edit worth nothing more than the treatment of a vandal.

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.
3. Go to the history page.
4. Click on the blue-linked "rollback" at the right-hand side of the last edit string.
5. This will rollback the page to the version prior to your edits.
6. To see the difference between rollback and the undo tool, go back to the page history and click "undo" instead of rollback.

Mass reversions

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 WP:SPAM), you may decide to roll back all recent edits by this editor. This can be done using the "rollback" buttons on the editor's contributions page.

Use this capability carefully, though, because you may blindly end up reverting good edits.

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