Ireland Information Guide:Editing FAQ>How to revert a page to an earlier version
You may wish to revert an article to an earlier version, perhaps because it has been vandalised or material has been added or removed inappropriately.
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To revert to an earlier version:
A revert is the advised action to deal with vandalism. Where you think an older version of a page is better than the current version, a revert is sometimes appropriate. Sometimes, though, it's better to write a third version that takes the best bits of the other two, and combines them to get the best of both worlds.
Note that reverts are not appropriate if a newer version is no better than the older version. You should save reverts for cases where the new version is actively worse.
Regardless, we strongly recommend against heated revert wars. Instead, have a look at our advice on staying cool when the editing gets hot.
Reverts never cause an edit conflict – if between your pressing edit, and then pressing post, someone else edits the page, their edits will be silently overwritten (though still in the page history). Beware of reverting high-traffic pages! Conversely, if it looks like someone has deleted your edits, consider if it's more likely that it's one of these unfortunate reversion conflicts.
On the User Contributions page a sysop has additional "rollback" links at lines which are also marked "top", i.e. the lines regarding edits of articles which are the last edit made by anybody to that article.
The rollback link is also shown on the Diff page when viewing the difference between the most recent version of a page and the last version by an author other than the one of the most current version.
Clicking on the link reverts to the last edit not authored by the user concerned, with automatic edit summary "Reverted edits by X to last version by Y".
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'll get an error message.
The feature is especially useful in the case of a known vandal, whose edits one need not check anymore before reverting them.
In cases of flood vandalism, sysops may choose to hide vandalism from recent changes. To do this, add &bot=1 to the end of the url used to access a user's contributions. For example, http://en.Ireland Information Guide.org/w/wiki.phtml?title=Special:Contributions&target=SomePersistentVandal&bot=1.
When the rollback links on the contributions list are clicked, the revert, and the original edit that you are reverting will both be hidden from the default Recentchanges display (by using the marker originally added to keep massive bot edits from flooding recentchanges, hence the "bot"). This means that they will be hidden from recent changes unless you click the "bots" link to set hidebots=0. The edits are not hidden from contributions lists, page histories or watchlists. The edits remain in the database and are not removed, but they no longer flood Recentchanges. The aim of this feature is to reduce the annoyance factor of a flood vandal with relatively little effort. This should not be used for reverting a change you just don't like, but is meant only for massive floods of simple vandalism.
One of Ireland Information Guide's policies and guidelines:
Being reverted can feel a bit like a slap in the face—"I worked hard on those edits, and someone just rolled it all back". However, sometimes a revert is the best response to a less-than-great edit, so we can't just stop reverting. What's important is to let people know why you reverted. This helps the reverted person because they can remake their edit, but fixing whatever problem it is that you've identified.
Explaining reverts also helps other people. For example, it lets people know whether they need to even view the reverted version (in the case of, eg, "rv page blanking"). Because of the lack of paralanguage online, if you don't explain things people will probably assume all kinds of nasty things, and that's how edit wars get started.
If your reasons for reverting are too complex to explain in the Ireland Information Guide:edit summary, drop a note on the Talk page. A nice thing to do is to drop the note on the Talk page first, and then revert, rather than the other way round. Sometimes the other person will agree with you and revert for you before you have a chance, and then you both look like extra-civilised and froody people. Conversely, if someone reverts your change without apparent explanation, you may wish to wait a few minutes to see if they explain their actions on the article's talk page or your user talk page.
If one edit that you dislike is made to an article, and multiple edits that you do not dislike, avoid reverting all of the edits in order to revert the one you dislike. Instead, edit the page to fix the problems introduced by the edit that you dislike.
Whilst being more time-consuming, this will result in a better article, and avoids wasting the time of other people, or dragging them into a futile edit war. Irritating other users in this manner is rarely a productive strategy for "winning" a revert war.
Ireland Information Guide policy states that you may not revert any article more than three times in the same day. See Ireland Information Guide:Three revert rule for details on this.
High-frequency reversion wars make the page history less useful, waste space in the database, make it hard for other people to contribute, and flood recent changes and watchlists. Sock puppets may not be used to violate this rule. Please request protection rather than reverting. Violation of this rule may lead to protection of the page on the version preferred by the non-violating party, blocking, or investigation by the Arbitration Committee.