Editing Incubator escapee wiki:Help desk/Archive 6 (section)

== How to revert only the diffs made by an old change ==

On the [[G]] page (for the letter G) a past edit appears to have accidentially deleted a lot of content.  Many edits to that page have happened since (including a Mediawiki bot), so a simple revert is not appropriate.  What is the best way to regain all that content?  See [[Talk:G]] for details.

:The simplest way is to copy-and-paste the missing content from an old revision into the current revision. If the merge is too complicated to do by hand, you can do it off-line using a [[three-way merge]] tool like the [[Unix]] <code>merge</code> program or the [[Emacs]] <code>emerge</code> program.

:For example, suppose that we have a history looking like this:

# (cur) (last)  13:36, 2004 Jul 27 user3 (add material)
# ...
# (cur) (last)  13:36, 2004 Jul 27 user2 (oops, accidentally deleted stuff)
# (cur) (last)  10:41, 2004 Jul 20 user1 (add stuff)
# ...

:Save the sources for revisions 1, 3, and 4 to the files <code>rev1</code>, <code>rev3</code>, and <code>rev4</code> respectively, then merge the changes from revision 3 &rarr; 1 into revision 4. For example, using the Unix <code>merge</code> tool, run: <code>merge rev4 rev3 rev1</code>. Sort out merge conflicts (indicated by lines beginning <code>&lt;&lt;&lt;&lt;&lt;&lt;&lt;</code>) and tidy up other problems. Submit the result back to Wikipedia. [[User:Gdr|Gdr]] 10:54, 2004 Aug 2 (UTC)

::Items excluded from [[G]] have been re-included.  [[User:Noisy|Noisy]] 13:18, 2 Aug 2004 (UTC)