- Additional relevant information can be found at Help:Reverting#Rollback.
As an admin (or rollbacker), you may spend much of your time reverting changes made to pages. You may be familiar with the undo feature, which undoes the last edit to a page, and manual reverts, which allow you to revert to any edit of a page by opening any page history revision, clicking edit, and saving. As an admin (or rollbacker), you also have the rollback feature, to expedite the process. It's important to note that a rollback requires only a single click to revert one or more edits. There is no confirmation after the link is clicked.
- Manual reverts requires multiple clicks.
- The rollback feature undoes all the consecutive edits made by an editor to a single page. 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 is subject to the rollback guideline, which explains when rollback can be used, when it cannot, etc. In summary, it should not be used for edits that were made in good faith (even if problematic). Misuse of rollback may lead to the removal of administrator (or rollback) privileges.
Demonstration of reverting edits using rollback
- Go to the page you wish to use the rollback feature on. In this case, we will use Wikipedia:Administrators' guide/Rollback/rollback.
- Add two or more edits to the page by clicking here. Use edit summaries, edit1, edit2, etc.
- Close the tab containing the page.
- Go to the history page.
- Click on the blue-linked "rollback" (rollback | undo) at the right-hand side of the last edit string. This will immediately roll back 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.
Tools
- Twinkle – Provides "good-faith revert", "rollback", and "rollback (vandal)" links when viewing the diff of the most recent edit to a page. Only requires autoconfirmed permissions to work.
- massRollback – Rollback all edits made by a particular user. Proceed with caution!
- Huggle - A tool for anti-vandalism that, on the English Wikipedia, requires rollback permissions to work.
- RedWarn - Includes an option to use rollback to make reverting quicker, but, like Twinkle, can be used by any autoconfirmed user.
- AntiVandal - Web-based counter-vandalism tool, similar to Huggle in interface and usage but more lightweight. Requires rollback permission or inclusion in the AntiVandal whitelist.