Battlestar Wiki:Reverting

This page is one of Battlestar Wiki's many projects. This page serves to coordinate discussion on a particular aspect of this Wiki. The formal recommendations of a project may be treated as policies.

Reverting is the act of undoing all recent changes to an article. Reverts can be total or partial.

A revert occurs when a significant change has occurred to an article or page that contains controversial or unsourced content, is badly formatted, contains patent nonsense, or has been vandalized.

Any contributor can revert an article by entering the page history and opening a previously-saved copy of the article.

To revert a page to an earlier version:

• Go to the page you wish to revert, click on the History tab at the top of the page, then click on the time and date of the earlier version you want to revert to. It will not work if you click on 'cur', 'last', or "Compare selected versions".
• When the page displays, text similar to this: (Revision as of 23:19 Jul 15, 2003), will display. It appears below the page's title, in place of the From {project name}, usually seen.
• Verify that you've selected the correct version, then click a link to edit the page as you would normally.
• You'll get a warning, above the edit box, about editing an out-of-date revision.
• Ignore the warning and save the page. Be sure to add the word "revert" (or "rv") to the edit summary, along with a short explanation if not obvious.

Administrators have a special ability to revert an article instantly to its last version. This is known as a rollback. Administrators who rollback an article typically notify other contributors of the change on the article's Talk page, and also directly notify the reasons of the rollback to the contributor's Talk page.

For more information on the revert process as used in the MediaWiki software (which Battlestar Wiki uses), see the Wikipedia article Revert.