Thanks for filing this @Dragoniez. I think a starting point is probably to build some consensus on-wiki that a community would like to see this disabled. Is there a discussion happening that you could link to? cc @Trizek-WMF

@kostajh Oh I'm sorry, I'm new here and I thought we can post some random ideas directly on phabricator and discuss them here. Should I go make a thread on e.g. enwiki for discussion to build a consensus?

@Dragoniez See https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Requesting_wiki_configuration_changes if you refer to some specific Wikimedia site (e.g. enwiki)

Thank you for opening this task, @Dragoniez. May I ask you on which data or experience your request is based on? I'm curious to know how you reached the conclusion that vandals like getting such messages.

Also, I think you would be surprised to see communities asking for enabling this notification: T273787: Enable edit revert notif by default on Wikipedia FR. :)

Hi @Trizek-WMF, thank you for your reply. I have rollback rights on the Japanese Wikipedia and revert vandal edits on a daily basis, and I frequently face situations in which vandal users revert my (and others') rollback edits just in a minute or so (e.g. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5) (the last 2 are instances on enwiki; you might want to search for '巻き戻し' on the Japanese links to find rollback edits). Currently, rollbacking sends a notification to the user whose edit's been rollbacked, and I think this notification is unnecessary because it makes it easier for vandal users to find pages to re-vandalize. Please note that I'm talking about the rollback revert only, not about the undo revert. I think the notification function for the undo revert should be as it is now because it's a very useful function and also because it's used to revert good-faith and non-vandalism edits. My idea is particularly important to rollbackers, who don't have block rights unlike sysops. Sysop can settle vandalism by blocking the relevant users or protecting the affected page, but we rollbackers need to always be careful not to do any harm on the revision history of the page before sysops take some countermeasures, because we want to keep it clean and prevent further vandalism and edit wars. One way to do this is do a manual revert, because this doesn't send notifications. But since manual revert can't be done automatically, it's nowhere near efficient than rollback. For this reason, I have always wanted rollback to not send notifications, and these are the reasons why I think notifications should be disabled for the rollback revert (across all wikiprojects). Thank you.

@Dragoniez, thank you for your explanation!

Maybe the problem is not around the notification, but it is about the fact that new accounts have the right to rollback. It is not common at wikis as big as yours. Most big Wikipedias give this right to admins, or to a few selected users.

If we prevent these new users to rollback edits, just undo them, do you think it would have an impact?

@Trizek-WMF, I think that that would involve some serious drawbacks, unfortunately. This is because new users and IP users would then need to do a manual revert any time when they want to revert others' edits, and the problem is that manual revert is way more complex than undo revert. Undo revert is very simple and straightforward because users just need to hit the undo link, but when you need to do a manual revert, you need to either first open a diff page and then do action=edit, or make exactly the same edit as the relevant previous revision. (And I'm pretty sure that even some extended-confirmed users don't know how to restore a previous revision from a diff.) Plus, the number of bad-faith edits is limited, and overall, undo reverts by new users are good-faith edits (like reverting vandalism edits). Disallowing undo reverts for new users would be easy because it can be achieved just by hiding the undo link for them via the CSS, but this is unlikely to be a solution for this matter, unfortunately.

Small Wikipedias are mainly maintained by global sysops, global rollbackers, and stewards, but probably the situation is the same as other big Wikipedias. So, as far as I'm concerned, disabling rollback notifications would be the only solution for this problem.

@Dragoniez, We have 3 actions in history pages:

• Undo: which means that the user used the "undo" link
• Rollback: which means that the user used the "rollback" link
• Reverted: which means the edit was either undone or rollbacked.

New users or IPs can undo a diff, which will be tagged as "reverted".

But at English Wikipedia or at Japanese Wikipedia new accounts don't get any notification for reverts. Actually, it seems that no new account gets this notification, at any wiki. The only exception is on Apps, but the examples you gave were not coming from App users (they would have been tagged as "Mobile App Edits").

In this example you gave, the user has undone the edit but technically never got a notification for it. They were probably watching the article (no matter how) and they found the history page. It seems to be the same for other examples you gave.

I'm sorry, but your request seems to be invalid, as we can't remove a notification that is actually not displayed to new users.

@Trizek-WMF, thank you for your reply again! And I'm sorry, I didn't know new accounts don't get notifications for reverts on jawiki and enwiki. Before I filed this (actually long ago), I took a look at ja:Wikipedia:通知, en:Help:Notifications, and mw:Help:Notifications/Types, but I only found "Received when your edits are undone or rolled back", and for this reason I had been thinking any account gets revert notifications when their edits are rolled back.

I really appreciate your time and help for this thread.