Wikipedia:Rollback for non-administrators proposal

The following discussion is preserved as an archive. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

On the user contributions page, admins have the additional "rollback" links at lines which are the last edit made by anybody to that article. Some user scripts (mentioned below) also give users the ability to rollback with an automated edit summary. The rollback link is also shown on the diff page when viewing the difference between any version of the page and the most recent one.

Clicking on the link reverts to the previous edit not authored by the last editor, with an default edit summary of "Reverted edits by X (talk) to last version by Y," which marks the edit as "minor." The edit summary can be changed by adding a "summary" parameter to the URL given by the link. If, between loading the User Contributions page and pressing "rollback," someone else edits or rolls back the page, or if there was no previous editor, you will get an error message.

Traditionally, this has been open only to administrators but with the help of the developers, it may be possible for non-administrators to have this tool to aid them with recent change patrolling.

[edit] Motivation and intention

Rollback is a great tool to counter vandalism. It is significantly faster to follow a link than to perform the equivalent operation by loading and saving the edit form and in some cases also checking the page history. A lot of good users working against vandalism are not administrators, so they can greatly benefit from having this tool. As such the intended use is to counter vandalism and malfunctioning bots, it is not the intention of this proposal to allow rollback for any other purpose.

[edit] Proposal

[edit] The way it works

Users may request the rollback button should they suffice in having the minimum requirement as detailed below.

• They should first put a request in at the section below.
• Administrators should check the history of the contributor to see if they can be trusted with the tool.
• If the administrator is satisfied, they can then go to Special:Userrights (see $wgAddGroups and $wgRemoveGroups before thinking whoever put Userrights in has gone mad) and this will add the user into the rollback usergoup, giving them the rollback tool.
• If there is misconduct coming from the users use of the tool, administrators may go to Special:Userrights and this will remove the user from the rollback usergroup, thus removing the tool. This should be done with a consensus on the administrators' noticeboard, for obvious misuse in content disputes, or any other blatant misuse of rollback when an explanation of the reversion is required. These types of reverts should always be done manually or with "undo"

[edit] Requirements for users to have rollback

Due to the nature of the rollback button, access cannot simply be granted to everyone. It will instead be assigned by administrators, on request. Administrators should evaluate requests for rollback on individual merit and review the users contributors edit history before granting them the permission. A user's history should show experience sufficient to convince administrators that misuse of the rollback feature will not occur.

[edit] Requests for rollback

Users that wish to have rollback would do so using the following method.

*{{Userlinks|Username}} - short statement on the reasons for requesting rollback. ~~~~

The above discussion is preserved as an archive. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page, such as the current discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.