Wikipedia:Stable version to revert to

In a content or title dispute editors are generally expected to BRD if a change made is reverted however its not clear how long the new content/title has to have been in place for it to be considered "stable". A rough guide may be a few months isn't enough to be stable, 6-9 months it depends, longer than a year generally is and more than 2 years is. However there is no current consensus on this. Please note that this isn't intended to be a strict limit on when something has implied consensus but a general guide on how long this takes, see Talk:Raleigh (disambiguation)#Requested move for example.

General factors

The age of the page also matters and if its an important/contentious topic as well as if its a current event. One might think that if a major change was made to a major/controversial topic a few months ago without objection until now, as opposed to being made to an obscure topic but this actually may show that the change does have consensus since we would reasonably assume far more people are watching a major topic than an obscure one and thus its more likely the change has consensus. Consider also if the change has been questioned on the talk page even if it hasn't actually been reverted, for example if a change is made and 1 week later its questioned on the talk and again 6 months later and again another 6 months later and again a year later even though the change has now physically been in place for over 2 years since it was challenged we may find that there was no consensus for the change even though 2 years would normally be more than enough time.

Edits

WP:NOCONSENSUS says the version prior to the bold edit is usually kept unless its continuous matters relating to living people and external links. However for the 1st there's no definition on how long ago the bold edit occurred for this to apply. Perhaps it would depend on the content as well as the consensus, for example if there was "no consensus" but the consensus was leaning against a change made 11 months ago we might decide to revert in such case however if the change was only made 5 months ago but despite "no consensus" the consensus was leaning towards keeping it we might decide not to revert.

Moves

WP:TITLECHANGES says "If it has never been stable, or it has been unstable for a long time, and no consensus can be reached on what the title should be, default to the title used by the first major contributor after the article ceased to be a stub" so again there is no definition as to how long a bold move takes to be the "stable" title. If an article has been located at a title for years but in the last few months had several moves then we'd probably consider the title it was at for years to be the stable title on the other hand if it's had several moves a year for the last few years we may consider it to have been unstable for a long time and revert back to the title the first major contributor used. If like Maven (wrestler) the move was against a previous RM then it should probably be returned to the previous consensus even if the undiscussed move was years ago.

RETAIN

RETAIN is generally designed to prevent edits/moves from content/titles that are near equal choices but the change changes the variety of English used for example Color/Colour and Petrol/Gasoline similar to MOS:VAR. However editors citing RETAIN often fail to notice that it does have exceptions such as if the topic has strong ties to a variety for example although Monopoly (game) is played nationally and many people in England think the London one is the original, the original is American so even if the article was created and expanded in British English we could still change it to American English without violating RETAIN. For reasons of communality, that is to say using a title that is acceptable or all (or at least more) varieties than the original variety. Or for natural disambiguation for example if we created Lift (device) it would be acceptable to move it to Elevator. However natural disambiguation should probably only be used in cases where there are 2 titles that are a near equal choice rather than to allow significantly worse titles so common name and communality usually come first so if term "A" is used 55% of the time in 1 variety and 1% of the time in another while term "B" was used 45% of the time in the 1st variety and 99% of the time in the 2nd it may still be better to chose term B even if that term requires a qualifier and even if the article was originally created at A.

Other areas

Other areas where this impacts include:

• Wikipedia:Requested moves/Technical requests#Requests to revert undiscussed moves
• WP:C2D, part of Categories for discussion/Speedy