User:Eumat114/essays/On rollback

On the rollbacker rights of Wikipedia

As a rollbacker since 4 years, I have realized that rollback is a very special user group, in which it does not provide any functionality otherwise inaccessible to users without the right. A new page patroller can mark pages as reviewed while "ordinary", or extended confirmed users cannot. An event coordinator can change users' access levels (to confirmed) while extended confirmed users cannot. However, rollback feature exists only for convenience; anyone without the rollback rights can simply click on the page history, scan the history and press the undo button on that user's first edit.

Alternatives to rollback

There are two main alternatives to rollback:

• The procedure as mentioned above;
• Twinkle's Rollback feature.

So what advantages does the original rollback provide, as compared to these?

1. Speed. This rollback feature allows for faster reversion of vandalism. For reversion of vandalism of two pre-opened pages, both rollback and Twinkle's feature took around 20 seconds in total while standard undo takes over 50 seconds.
2. Good faith reversions. The rollback feature shows the number of edits that user has made in a row. For good faith editors, it may be likely that only one out of many edits are unconstructive (but still intended to be constructive), and the rollback feature allows us to be aware of that fact and use the undo feature instead.
3. Access to other tools. Rollback allows the use of other tools, most importantly Huggle, an even faster anti-vandalism program.

Conclusion

So, what does rollback give us? Convenience. And also access to other tools. So - rollback is not that all useless!