Wikidata:Rollbackers

This page documents a Wikidata guideline. It is a generally accepted standard that editors should follow, though it should be treated with common sense, and occasional exceptions may apply. Changes made to it should reflect consensus. When in doubt, discuss your idea on the project chat.

On Wikidata, rollbackers are users who have the technical ability to undo edits with a single click (the "undo" feature, which all non-blocked users have access to, requires confirming the edit). With one click, they can undo all the edits made by the most recent editor of any item or page. Rollbackers cannot only undo part of a series of edits – to do that, they must use the "restore" button. (Or, outside of the main, Property, Lexeme, and EntitySchema namespaces, one should click "edit" on the old revision of the page, and press "save".)

The difference between "restore" and "undo" is: restore undoes all edits back up to the selected edits, and undo undoes a selected edit. However, undo is more versatile than allowing only undoing a single edit — if initiated from the diff view, it will try to undo the changes made by whatever edits were selected; if clicking on the undo link in a page history, it’ll try to undo that single edit. It can be used to revert a single edit or multiple edits in a row (even if they were made by different users); it can revert the latest edit(s) or even older one(s) without reverting the latest edit.

Rollback should only be used to revert vandalism and test edits. If the edit was a test, ideally you should leave a friendly note on the user's talk page, directing them to the Wikidata Sandbox. (In some cases, it might still be preferable to use "undo" and a custom summary when reverting test edits.) Rollback cannot be used with a custom summary unless you have a script in your common.js that allows this, so unless you have such a script, it should not be used to undo good-faith contributions that were not test edits or vandalism. Remember that rollback marks your reverts as "minor".

Requesting rollback

Rollback rights may be requested at Wikidata:Requests for permissions: Requests for rollbacker flag. Users may self-nominate, or nominate one another; however, users should not be given rollback if they do not want it, and non-self-nomination requests should be put on hold until the nominee comments accepting the nomination.

Administrators may add the rollbacker flag to the accounts of users who:

are generally trusted members of the community, preferably with at least some history in working against vandalism, or
have a strong history of combating vandalism on other projects, and have shown a satisfactory understanding of how Wikidata works.

Administrators, global rollbackers and stewards automatically have access to the rollback feature, so they do not need to be granted the local rollbacker flag.

List

A list of users with the rollbacker flag can be found at Special:ListUsers/rollbacker.

User groups