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Help:Reverting
Reverting means undoing the effects of one or more edits, which normally results in the page being restored to a version that existed sometime previously. Reasons for reverting are:
- You (Or someone) made a mistake on the page.
- Vandalism
- Blanked page
To revert or undo, heres how:
- Click the "history" tab at the top of the page to display the page history.
- Click the time and date of the earlier version to which you wish to revert. You will see a phrase similar to: "This is an old revision of this page, as edited by ***.***.***.*** (Talk) at 15:47, January 24, 2010. It may differ significantly from the current revision."
Important: in the case of vandalism, take the time to make sure that you are reverting to the last version without the vandalism; there may be multiple consecutive vandal edits or they may be interspersed between constructive edits.
- Click the "edit" tab as you normally would to edit a page. (Above the edit box, you will see a warning similar to: "You are editing an old revision of this page. If you save it, any changes made since then will be removed.") If editing requires a registered account, log in first, or leave a note on the article's talkpage.
- Complete the edit summary field (the abbreviation "rv" can be used to stand for "revert"; the edit summary "rvv" means "reverting vandalism").
Save the page.
- If constructive edits had been made after those that you wished to revert, return to the page history to find those edits, and redo them by hand if reasonably possible.
Rollback features
This tool appears when looking at the "differences" between edits. It allows a user to revert one or more edits just by clicking the [rollback] button. Rollback will automatically revert all edits made by that user and return the page to the state it was in before that user edited it. The rollback feature is used almost exclusively within the history page of an article.
The following edit summary is automatically inserted as follows:
- m Reverted edits by User A (talk) to last version by User B
Where User A depicts the editor whose changes are being reverted, while User B signals the last editor of the page before User A's edits. Because the feature is used mostly to revert vandalism, a link to User A's talk page is also included as an easy way to issue warnings to that user.
In all cases the rollback signals itself as a "minor edit", hence the bold "m" at the beginning.
