User:Ostrzyciel/GSoC 2020/help

A revert is (broadly speaking) an edit removing some previous contributions from a page. It is usually used when combating spam, vandalism and removing other content that is considered unsuitable on your wiki.

MediaWiki provides multiple methods of reverting changes, along with additional features that will help you keep track of reverts and reverted edits.

Revert methods
This section describes all revert methods provided by MediaWiki by default. Extensions and gadgets may add more revert methods.

Manual revert
A manual revert is performed by simply editing a page and manually removing parts of it. You can also pick a previous revision from page's history and, while viewing it, click the edit button. This will let you base your edit on that previous revision that does not contain undesirable content.

Manual revert tag
Todo: screenshot with the tag

MediaWiki will automatically mark manual reverts with the mw-manual-revert change tag, if they restore the page to an exact previous state. In order to do this, MediaWiki compares the new edit's content to recent edits on the page and tries to find an exact match.

The amount of recent edits that will be checked is configurable (through the  variable) and by default set to 15. See m:Research:Revert for a discussion on this topic and links to papers that led to choosing 15 as the optimal value.