MediaWiki talk:Undo-summary

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Contents

[edit] Revision

I'm not putting {{editprotected}} here yet because I'm not sure, but what do people think about the possibility of having a WP:AES arrow on here to show it's an autosummary? --ais523 17:54, 2 February 2007 (UTC)

That makes sense to me. HighInBC (Need help? Ask me) 17:56, 2 February 2007 (UTC)

{{editprotected}} Seriously, "Undid"? What was wrong with Undo? Undo is a verb, Undid isn't even in the right tense--172.165.169.16 18:32, 2 February 2007 (UTC)

Hm... "undo" does sound a bit better to me, too, although most reversion scripts use "reverted" in their summaries, so if we're interested in keeping consistency with our tenses... anyway, what do others think? Luna Santin 23:04, 3 February 2007 (UTC)
"←Reverted revision _________ by Username (talk) using 'undo'" would be the best wording IMO -137.222.10.67 17:46, 4 February 2007 (UTC)

I agree with User:137.222.10.67's proposal; here's the updated wording:

[[WP:AES|←]]Reverted revision $1 by [[Special:Contributions/$2|$2]] ([[User talk:$2|talk]]) using [[Help:Reverting#Undo|undo]]

The only change from that anon's proposal is that I've removed the quotes around 'undo'. --ais523 10:26, 5 February 2007 (UTC)

Makes sense. Done. Proto::► 15:57, 5 February 2007 (UTC)

I like to add some custom edit summary text at the end when using undo, but recent changes are making me struggle with the character limit. I'd prefer a much more concise message, code-wise. –Gunslinger47 08:02, 6 February 2007 (UTC)

Personally, I don't understand version numbers, but would find it useful to see at a glance which author's version has been reverted to, e.g. last version by user:X. Just a thought. MikeHobday 13:41, 7 February 2007 (UTC)

copied from User talk:Centrx
1. Why did you remove the WP:AES-linking arrow?
2. I don't object to your wording, but why did you unilaterally overrule the decision reached on the talk page without even participating in the discussion?
3. What do you mean by "This is /not/ a revert, "Reverted" is simply false."? On the English Wikipedia, undoing a change (even if this doesn't affect the entire page) is defined as "reverting," and this is a good fact to convey. (I've seen numerous editors claim that they didn't violate the 3RR because they manually replaced part of the text instead of "reverting.") —David Levy 14:31, 10 February 2007 (UTC)

1. The WP:AES-linking arrow was for situations where the user could make some change to the page where an edit summary would be automatically and unknowingly supplied. This does not make sense for rollback, because rollback requires a knowing admin to click on a link, and it makes even less sense for undo, because not only is the editor clicking on a link, but the automatically supplied edit summary is displayed in the edit summary box before the change is even made.
2. The edit summary a participation in the discussion. I could have copied the edit summary to the talk page, but that would seem to be rather redundant. I could have brought the matter up without making any edit, but the change reversed is a brand new one and the talk page discussants appeared not to have previously considered the objections (and so, as is fairly common, would agree with them without even needing any discussion).
3. Reverting does, very uncommonly, refer to reversing some old change, though most of the time it is exactly a revert of the recent-most changes. The misunderstanding is correct considering the general meaning and common use of the word, it just does not precisely fit with 3RR's special use of it. If someone is making a single edit the undoes something from a month ago, that is not reverting. For 3RR, however, they must be doing it multiple times for recent edits. The situations are much different, and it is misleading to someone looking at the page history for the summary to say "Reverted". The developers knew the word "Reverted", but it would not make sense for someone to click on the "revert" button for some old edit or for the edit summary to say "Reverted", against the common meaning of the word—and the only meaning of the word in page histories. —Centrx→talk • 15:08, 10 February 2007 (UTC)
1. I disagree. While it's less likely that someone responsible for such an edit would be unaware of the summary's existence, it remains likely that inexperienced editors will sometimes accidentally misuse this function (because they don't understand how it works, mistakenly believe that its use is appropriate, or are simply testing it out). Without any indication to the contrary, it appears that the user definitely knows exactly what he/she is doing (and most likely has installed an unidentified automation script).
2. Your summary was cut off and didn't fully explain your changes.
3. I agree that there is confusion regarding the conflicting terminology (and that it probably is wise to avoid using the term in this summary), but I dispute your assertion that the previous wording was incorrect. —David Levy 15:28, 10 February 2007 (UTC)
1. The AES arrow makes perfect sense. It's an automatic edit summary. Simple as that.
2. Please don't do that. Talk page, then edit, particularly on permanently protected templates where people can't revert. It's a very thin line.
3. See WP:REVERT - "To revert is to undo all changes made to an article page after a specific time in the past.". It's correct. [[WP:AES|←]]Reverted revision $1 by [[Special:Contributions/$2|$2]] ([[User talk:$2|talk]]) via [[Help:Reverting#Undo|undo]] is simply a clearer message and links to what Undo and Reverting /is/. "Undid" also sounds horrible and isn't a word used in Wikipedia normally. -Halo 17:32, 10 February 2007 (UTC)
Undo doesn't revert all changes, it removes one revision, and does not touch any subsequent revisions. Prodego talk 17:47, 10 February 2007 (UTC)
[edit conflict with Prodego] But undo doesn't "undo all changes made to an article page after a specific time in the past" — it undoes the changes made in ONE particular revision, regardless of what has been added or deleted since. They're two entirely different concepts. Also, this wasn't the original intent of WP:AES at all, but I don't really have a problem with it in this case, I guess. —bbatsell ¿? ✍ 17:49, 10 February 2007 (UTC)
1. I agree that using the word "reverted" in this context is confusing (despite the fact that the English Wikipedia applies a definition that isn't limited to restoring a previous page version in its entirety), and I agree with its removal.
2. I created and linked to the WP:AES page to address the mistaken belief (reported by numerous users) that vandals were mocking the community by deliberately describing their edits via summaries. (In fact, many of these edits were well-meaning tests.) The link serves exactly the same purpose here, so I disagree that it contradicts the original intent. —David Levy 17:59, 10 February 2007 (UTC)
When I said WP:AES, I meant the actual automatic application of edit summaries for the 4 types edits it does it for, not necessarily the project page outlining what it does. In this case, it's not really "automatic" (as those 4 are), it's more of a "default", as the user can change it to whatever he/she wants. But like I said, I don't really have a problem with it. —bbatsell ¿? ✍ 18:08, 10 February 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Undo revision $1 by [[Special:Contributions/$2|$2]] ([[User talk:$2|talk]])

What was wrong with this version?--162.84.217.206 21:38, 10 February 2007 (UTC)

  • It's in the present tense. Proto::► 21:43, 10 February 2007 (UTC)
    • Aren't edit summaries supposed to be in the present tense?--162.84.217.206 21:46, 10 February 2007 (UTC)
      • I don't think they're supposed to be any which way. I use the present tense personally —bbatsell ¿? ✍ 21:48, 10 February 2007 (UTC)
        • Feel free to use whichever tense you prefer, but our software-generated edit summaries are written in the past tense. —David Levy 22:59, 10 February 2007 (UTC)
        • I use the past tense normally. Uncle G 14:17, 11 February 2007 (UTC)

[edit] How about

[[WP:AES|←]]Revision $1 undone by [[Special:Contributions/$2|$2]] ([[User talk:$2|talk]])

It's better grammar than the other options floating around. Proto::► 21:43, 10 February 2007 (UTC)

$2 is the author of the edit being undone, not the undoer, so that would need some tweaking. —bbatsell ¿? ✍ 21:46, 10 February 2007 (UTC)
Howsabout:
[[WP:AES|←]]Revision $1 by [[Special:Contributions/$2|$2]] ([[User talk:$2|talk]]) has been undone.
Yes? No? Proto::► 15:30, 13 February 2007 (UTC)

[edit] How's this?

$1 by [[Special:Contributions/$2|$2]] ([[User talk:$2|talk]]) [[WP:EAS|undone]]

I think the fewer nouns we use, the easier it will be to reach a consensus version--162.84.217.206 21:52, 10 February 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Discussion

(Sorry, I'm having trouble trying to figure out where to contribute to this conversation, so I've created a new section). Personally, I dislike the use of the word 'undid' in an edit summary. I normally write edit summaries in the present tense, and use heavy abbreviation. To me, 'reverted' looks fine, but 'undid' looks strange (and other people disagree with 'undo', and I can see why). One point in favour of using 'reverted' is that it's the summary used by most of the auto-revert tools, including rollback; if an admin removes vandalism, the summary doesn't say 'Rollback 1 edit...'. (Strangely enough, I was collecting reversion edit summaries a while ago as part of the work I was doing on my edit counter, so there's an incomplete list on User:Ais523/revertsum; manual reverts normally say 'rv' or 'rev', and automatic reverts say 'Reverted' or 'Revert to revision' (although AntiVandalBot uses 'rv').) I don't care too much about the AES arrow; I would prefer if they were greatly expanded to cover all autosummaries, including admin rollback (and with other symbols for bot and script edits), but if people don't agree with that I wouldn't mind it being removed from this message for consistency. --ais523 16:12, 12 February 2007 (UTC)

1. I don't understand why "undid" looks strange. It's a normal word in the English language, and all of our other software-generated edit summaries are written in the past tense. To me, "undo" seems strange, as it comes across as a future-tense instruction. ("Undoing" would seem more natural, but it still would be inconsistent with our other summaries.)
2. We now have a "b" marker for bot edits.
3. The AES arrow's purpose is to inform users that the accompanying edit summary may have been provided accidentally by an inexperienced user (and is not a deliberate description of the apparent vandalism that if often accompanies). In my opinion, you were correct to propose that the setup be expanded to include MediaWiki:Undo-summary, as the potential exists for the same sort of misunderstanding to occur. Administrators, however, are experienced and unlikely to be mistaken for vandals. —David Levy 16:41, 12 February 2007 (UTC)
I suppose the issue here is whether an undo is sufficiently close to a revert that they should use the same or similar edit summaries ('rv', 'rev', 'reverted' or 'revert' are used for almost all non-undo reverts). Undoing the top revision is nothing but a revert, so it seems slightly surprising that people want a substantially different edit summary than when reverting by hand, by rollback, or by script (the 'reverted ... using undo' summary that was the result of the editprotected above would be an example of a substantially similar summary). Undoing a deeper revision, however, is not a revert in the sense of go-to-the-history-click-on-the-date-edit-and-save, but a new operation. Originally, undo was only usable in such cases (undoing through intermediate edits); the feature to use an 'undo' link in the same place as a revert was added after discussion on wikitech-l (and there were even plans to program it a different way). In such cases, I would always use 'undo' in my summary before the autosummary was adopted (but different people use different tenses in their edit summaries). Before undo was implemented, my edit summaries would normally have read 'rm old vandalism' (I don't recall ever undoing a blanking by hand, so the edit would be a removal rather than a restoration). The other important point to my mind is that although 'undo' is a verb in English, it's being used as a noun to name the feature; I've never seen 'rollback' written in the past tense (as 'rolled back', presumably), and that would look equally odd in the edit summary to me. So the question is: Does 'undo' do a revert, or an undo; does it revert something, or undo it; does it undo, or did it undo? --ais523 16:58, 12 February 2007 (UTC)

A few options, there are a crapload:

  1. Undid revision X by user Y
  2. Revision X by user Y has been undone
  3. Undo - revision X by user Y
  4. Undone - revision X by user Y
  5. Undoing revision X (by user Y)
  6. User Y's revision (X) has been undone
  7. Revision X from user Y removed via undo

Can't think of any one perfect answer. Proto::► 15:40, 13 February 2007 (UTC)

In option 7, there's no such page as m:Undo; I've changed the link to the en copy of Meta's page about reverting. --ais523 11:21, 14 February 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Automatic edit summary

The undo summary is unlike any of the other summaries listed at WP:AES. The user confirms the change in question, sees the edit summary before committing the change, the user can change the edit summary and in so doing should not be required to specially delete parts of it to make it even accurate. With page blanking, replacement, creation, and redirection, the user does not confirm the change, has no opportunity to change the edit summary after seeing that one has been automatically supplied, and is not presented with any filled-in edit summary at all to delete.

There is no opportunity for the "accidental misuse" of the undo function because a diff is displayed when undoing any change, i.e. even if they did not understand how it works when they clicked the "undo" button, the exact change that is being made is displayed after they click it. —Centrx→talk • 15:49, 24 March 2007 (UTC)

You're assuming that the individual in question has a basic understanding of what a wiki is and how it works. That is not a safe assumption. —David Levy 03:14, 28 March 2007 (UTC)
The vast majority of edits by people who use the undo link in the page history do. Most of the people who do not understand how a wiki works have not figured out about the page history, and do not click mysterious "undo"; even if they do, they are not making multiple edits. The AES is to prevent people from incorrectly assuming that the person purposefully made the edit, but they did purposefully click on the "undo" link, and they did see the diff, and the summary regardless does describe what happened accurately. I see almost zero or zero advantage here, but it does create work for the numerous people who do use the undo link frequently. If the AES is supposed to indicate whether an edit or a summary was purposeful or not, its use here is mostly inaccurate: the edits are purposeful and furthermore verified. —Centrx→talk • 22:11, 28 March 2007 (UTC)
The arrow link is not supposed to indicate whether an edit or a summary was purposeful or not. It's supposed to indicate that the summary was generated (in whole or in part) automatically. The idea is to inform people that the edit/summary might have been unintentional, not that it definitely was. Therefore, there's absolutely no harm in displaying the arrow link in all cases (unless it's manually removed). It merely represents the fact that this is a MediaWiki-assisted summary (as opposed to something that the user typed entirely on his/her own). —David Levy 22:24, 28 March 2007 (UTC)
The harm is for the cases where the user does not want the arrow because it is misleading to imply that it was not a desired edit summary and because it consumed limited space there. Almost every use of the "undo" feature has no need whatsoever for the AES, and for the cases where the person was wiki-naive and somehow clicked thed page history, then clicked a revision diff, then clicked undo, then missed the diff and the edit summary box, all the while not having any idea what he was doing or that he was implementing a change, the AES still does not have the advantages as in the other summaries, e.g. not implying that vandalism had taunting or an experiment or test was in full knowledge. —Centrx→talk • 23:11, 28 March 2007 (UTC)
Again, the arrow does not imply that the edit summary was not desired. The link consumes very little space (and is easily removable in a rare case in which those 12 extra characters are needed).
Regardless, it just occurred to me that we could simply make the word "undid" a link to WP:UNDO instead. Is that acceptable? —David Levy 20:45, 29 March 2007 (UTC)
That's much better. —Centrx→talk • 21:53, 29 March 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Link to redirect page "WP:UNDO"

I feel that pointing the link to the destination page is better than pointing it to a redirect. Any opinion? --Deryck C. 05:24, 5 April 2007 (UTC)

Linking to Help:Reverting#Undo instead of WP:UNDO would consume 12 additional characters. —David Levy 05:30, 5 April 2007 (UTC)
Asking both the client and the server to parse two pages at a time will consume each of them far more than 12 additional character's capacity. --Deryck C. 05:45, 5 April 2007 (UTC)
That isn't the issue. (The developers have stated that even heavily used redirects have a negligible impact on the servers, and there certainly isn't a noticeable client-side performance difference.) The issue is that 12 fewer characters would be available for the edit summary. —David Levy 06:01, 5 April 2007 (UTC)
The client-side difference is significant when the internet connection is slow. Though, I'm convinced with your reasoning that we should leave more space for the editor to write his/her additional comments. --Deryck C. 07:54, 5 April 2007 (UTC)
I've used slow Internet connections and never noticed such a difference. Why would one exist? —David Levy 15:36, 5 April 2007 (UTC)
I don't see why it would. The redirection is done on the server side. —Centrx→talk • 15:54, 10 April 2007 (UTC)

Should the edit summary be more like:

"Revert revision $1 by $2 ($2)

instead of having it to be "Undid"? 68.5.224.107 03:44, 12 May 2007 (UTC)

I think "undid" is easier to understand. Newcomers don't really get the meaning of "revert" for the first few times they see it. --Deryck C. 14:22, 12 May 2007 (UTC)
Please read the above discussions, 68.5.224.107. —David Levy 14:45, 12 May 2007 (UTC)
Specifically, an undo is not the same as a revert. —Centrx→talk • 19:03, 16 May 2007 (UTC)
Different syntactic or procedural meaning, but same input, same output. --Deryck C. 03:13, 17 May 2007 (UTC)
No, an undo is only one revision which may be anywhere in the history whereas a revert may be any number of revisions that are most recent in the history. —Centrx→talk • 03:38, 17 May 2007 (UTC)