Why was my Wikipedia edit reverted?

What does it mean when a Wikipedia edit is reverted?

It means another editor, or a bot, has undone your change and restored the page to how it was before. Wikipedia's page on reverting defines a revert as an edit that reverses a prior edit, and a partial revert as one that keeps some of it and removes the rest. Most reverts are made with the undo button on the page history, but retyping the old text counts just the same.

Nothing you wrote is lost. Your edit remains in the article's history, where anyone can view it and where it can be restored if editors later agree it should be. Wikipedia's notification system sends registered users an alert when an edit of theirs is undone or rolled back, naming the editor and linking to the change.

A revert is not a sanction. It is the most ordinary event on Wikipedia, and the guidance on reverting expects editors to revert good-faith edits only with an explanation and after careful thought. What matters is the reason behind it, because that decides what you should do next.

How do you find out why your edit was reverted?

Open the article's history and read the edit summary on the revert. Click "View history" at the top of the article, find the revert in the list, and click "prev" beside it to see exactly what changed. The short note after the editor's name is the edit summary, and on a revert it usually states the reason, often with a link to a policy.

Wikipedia expects that explanation. Its consensus policy says all edits should be explained, unless the reason is obvious, either in the edit summary or on the talk page, and the help page on edit summaries says this matters most when reverting. The guidance on reverting adds that a terse summary such as "against consensus" should ideally link to the discussion where that consensus was reached.

If the summary does not tell you enough, look in three more places:

• The article's talk page. The reverting editor may have explained there, or there may be an earlier discussion about the same material.
• Your own talk page. A warning or note may have been left for you, often from a standard template that links to the relevant rule.
• The page history tags. Edits can carry automatic tags, and the history help page notes that these help editors spot possible problems without proving that an edit was wrong.

If the reason is still unclear, ask the editor who reverted you, politely and on their talk page or the article's. Asking is normal and expected. Arguing in edit summaries is not, and the help page warns against using them for debate.

What are the most common reasons edits are reverted?

A missing or unreliable source, promotional wording, a conflict of interest and a clash with an existing consensus account for most reverts. The table sets out what the reverting editor saw and what normally fixes it.

Two of these deserve a further word. A source can be reliable for one claim and unreliable for another, so "the source is a major newspaper" does not settle the matter if the article did not actually say what your sentence says. And when a discussion about adding, changing or removing material ends without agreement, the consensus policy says the usual result is to keep the article as it was before the change.

Was your edit reverted by a bot such as ClueBot NG?

If the history shows ClueBot NG, then yes, and the bot judged your edit likely to be vandalism. ClueBot NG is an anti-vandalism bot that tries to detect and revert vandalism quickly and automatically. According to its own documentation it does not use a list of banned words. It uses machine learning trained on a large set of edits that people have classified as vandalism or constructive, and reverts edits whose score passes a threshold.

That threshold is set deliberately low on mistakes. The bot's documentation says its current setting holds false positives at a maximum of 0.1 per cent of constructive edits, at the cost of catching roughly 40 per cent of vandalism. False positives still happen. The bot skips editors who have more than a threshold number of edits and few warnings, so newer editors are the ones most likely to meet it, and its own FAQ admits it can be hard to say why a particular edit was scored as it was.

If you think the bot got it wrong:

1. Find the revert ID. It appears in brackets after "Thanks, ClueBot NG" in the article history, or after "MySQL ID" in the message the bot leaves on your talk page.
2. Report it through the bot's false positive page, which asks for that ID. Reports are reviewed by an administrator and, if valid, used to train the bot.
3. Explain the change on the article's talk page, so that a human editor can consider it on its merits.

Other tools reverse edits too. Experienced editors with the rollback right can undo a run of edits by one account with a single click, and the rollback guidance limits that to vandalism and similar cases. If a human used rollback on a good-faith edit without explanation, that is a reasonable thing to raise with them.

What if your edit never saved at all?

Then it was probably stopped by an edit filter, not reverted. Wikipedia's edit filter checks every edit against a set of conditions written to catch common patterns of harmful editing. Depending on the filter, a matching edit can be logged, tagged for review, shown a warning that the edit may be a problem, or refused outright with a message.

A warning is not a refusal. The edit filter guideline says the editor can choose to save anyway or abandon the edit, although saving past a warning without thinking about it rarely ends well. A disallowed edit cannot be saved at all.

If you believe a filter stopped a legitimate edit, Wikipedia has a page for reporting edit filter false positives, reached through the link in the warning message. Do not try to reword the edit until it slips through. The blocking policy lists deliberately tripping the edit filter among the kinds of disruption that can lead to a block.

Was your edit reverted because of a conflict of interest?

It may have been, if you are connected to the subject and the edit went beyond a minor fix. Wikipedia's conflict of interest guideline strongly discourages people from directly editing articles about themselves, their employer or their clients, and editors who watch biographies and company articles revert promotional or self-serving changes quickly.

The guideline allows connected editors to make only a short list of edits directly: fixing spelling and markup, repairing broken links, removing spam and unambiguous vandalism, removing clear violations of the biographies policy, and a few others. If another editor objects for any reason, it says, the edit is not uncontroversial. Wikipedia's advice to people in public relations is firmer still and tells them never to remove negative material outside those exceptions.

A revert on these grounds is a signal to change method, not to argue. Our guide Can I edit my own Wikipedia page? sets out what connected people can change, and our guide to edit requests explains the route for everything else. Continuing to edit directly is how a single revert becomes a tag on the article and a thread on the conflict of interest noticeboard.

What should you do after your edit is reverted?

Read the reason, then discuss the change on the talk page instead of making it again. Wikipedia's page on reverting says that if a good-faith edit of yours is reverted, you should not simply reinstate it but leave the earlier version in place, or try a different way of making the change that takes the other editor's feedback into account.

The bold, revert, discuss cycle, a widely used approach described in Wikipedia's guidance, puts the same idea in three steps: you make a bold edit, someone reverts it, and you then discuss it with that person rather than reverting back. A sensible sequence looks like this:

1. Read the edit summary and any talk page discussion, and the policy it links to.
2. Decide honestly whether the editor had a point. Often the fix is a better source or plainer wording.
3. Open a talk page section that sets out the change, the source and, briefly, why it meets the policy.
4. Wait for a response. Give the discussion a few days before concluding nobody is interested.
5. If you and the other editor cannot agree, ask for outside views through Wikipedia's dispute resolution venues.

There is one important exception to waiting. Unsourced or poorly sourced contentious material about a living person should be removed straight away, and the biographies policy says that once it has been removed on good-faith grounds it should not go back without consensus. If your revert was that kind of removal, the discussion has to come first.

How do you avoid an edit war after a revert?

By not reverting back. Wikipedia's edit warring policy treats repeated reverting as disruptive, whatever the merits of the version being restored. Its bright line is the three-revert rule: an editor must not make more than three reverts on a single page within 24 hours, whether they involve the same material or not. A worked example of the count, and the stricter one-revert limits some pages carry, are in our edit warring guide.

• The rule applies per person, not per account, so reverts made from a second account count together.
• A first breach usually leads to a block of 24 hours. Longer blocks follow for repeat offences.
• The rule is a limit, not an allowance. Administrators can block for edit warring without a breach, for example when the same revert is made slowly over weeks.
• Being right is not a defence, and the policy's exemptions, such as removing clear vandalism or unsourced contentious claims about living people, are narrow.

If another editor keeps undoing your changes and discussion has stalled, the problem has become a dispute and the routes in our guide to repeated and hostile edits apply.

When does a reverted edit need a different approach?

If you are an ordinary editor, the edit was yours alone, and the reason was a missing source, the fix is in your hands: find the source, explain it on the talk page and let the discussion run.

The picture changes when the article is about you or your organisation, or when the same change has been undone more than once. Each revert, warning and talk page reply is a public record, and editors reviewing the article later read it as a pattern. A run of reverted edits from a connected account is often what leads to a conflict of interest tag, and a second or third attempt at the same change is often what turns a content disagreement into an edit warring report. At that point the useful work is diagnostic: reading the history to see what the reverting editors actually objected to, separating the parts of the change that can succeed from the parts that cannot, and putting a properly sourced proposal on the talk page.

That is the core of our article update work, and where a disagreement has hardened, our dispute support. Our free page health check includes a reading of the article's history.