Wikipedia:Administrators

Administrators, commonly abbreviated as admins and also called sysops, are Wikipedians to whom the community gives access to technical features that help with maintenance. Wikipedia practice is to grant administrator status to anyone who has been an active and regular Wikipedia contributor for at least a few months, is familiar with and respects Wikipedia policy, and who has gained the trust of the community. They can protect and delete pages, block other editors, and undo these actions as well. By default, these privileges are granted indefinitely and are only removed on request or under circumstances involving high level intervention (see Administrator abuse below). Administrators are editors who undertake additional responsibilities on a voluntary basis. They are not paid employees of the Wikimedia Foundation.

Request assistance - Full list of administrators - Requests for adminship

In the very early days of Wikipedia, all users functioned as administrators, and in principle they still should. Any user can behave in a way befitting an administrator (provided they do not falsely claim to be one), even if they have not been given the extra administrative functions. From early on, it has been pointed out that administrators should never develop into a special subgroup of the community but should be a part of the community like anyone else. However, they are equipped with a few more tools to do some chores that would potentially be harmful if everyone were entrusted with them. Although standards for administrator appointment have risen over time, several administrators are created every week.

The community does look to administrators to perform essential housekeeping chores that require the extra access administrators are entrusted with. Among them are watching the Articles for deletion debates and carrying out the consensus of the community on keeping or deleting these articles, keeping an eye on new and changed articles to swiftly delete obvious vandalism, and meeting user requests for help that require administrative access. Because administrators are expected to be experienced members of the community, users seeking help will often turn to an administrator for advice and information. In general, administrators acting in this role are neutral; they do not have any direct involvement in the issues they are helping people with.

Administrator tools

The wiki software has a few important features that are restricted. Of those restricted features, administrators have access to the following.

Protected pages

• Edit the Main Page and other protected pages. For information and guidelines, see Wikipedia:Editing the main page. You can suggest changes at Talk:Main Page. The main page used to receive a lot of vandalism; protecting it is an unfortunate compromise to keep our welcome mat free of random profanity.

• Protect and unprotect pages, with different kinds of protection against editing by certain classes of users, and page moving. Pages are generally protected rarely and temporarily. For information and guidelines, see Wikipedia:Protection policy.

Deletion and undeletion

• Delete pages, including images, and their history. For information and guidelines, see Wikipedia:Deletion policy and (most definitely) Wikipedia:Deletion guidelines for administrators. To suggest a page for deletion (after reading the policy and guidelines pages), see Wikipedia:Articles for deletion. Sometimes deletion is a technical matter, in which a redirection page has to be removed to make way for renaming an article, or a page whose history has been broken up has to be deleted and the pieces recombined. Other times it is a matter of cleaning up junk edits on pages with no actual content, or removing material that has been pasted from another site, thereby causing copyright infringement.

• View and restore deleted pages, including images, and their history. See Wikipedia:Viewing and restoring deleted pages by sysops for guidelines. To challenge a final decision to delete a page, see Wikipedia:Deletion review.

Block and unblock

• Block IP addresses, IP ranges, and user accounts, for a specific time or indefinitely.

• Unblock IP addresses, IP ranges, and user accounts.

• See Wikipedia:Blocking policy for more information on when blocks are appropriate and when they are not. See Special:Ipblocklist for currently blocked addresses and usernames.

Reverting

• Revert pages quickly. Any user (logged-in or not) can revert a page to an earlier version. Administrators have a faster, automated reversion tool to help them revert vandalism. When looking at a user's contributions, a link that looks like: [rollback] – appears next to edits that are at the top of the edit history. Clicking on the link reverts to the last edit not authored by that user, with an edit summary of (Reverted edits by X (talk) to last version by Y) and marks it as a minor change. One-click rollback is mainly intended for vandalism, spam, etc. Disputed content deserves an explanation, either in the edit summary or on the talk page, and it is not nice to omit that (either by rolling back, or by leaving the summary field blank).

Enforcement of Arbitration Committee rulings

Administrators have the authority to enforce rulings by the Arbitration Committee.

Further information: [[:Wikipedia:Requests for arbitration/Admin enforcement requested]]

Keeping vandalism out of recent changes

• Administrators can exclude bulk 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.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:Contributions&target=Example&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 recent changes display. (The bot marker was originally added to keep massive bot edits from flooding recent changes, 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 recent changes. 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 do not like, but is meant only for simple vandalism, particularly massive flood vandalism.

Design and wording of the interface

Administrators can:

• change the text of the interface by editing the pages in the MediaWiki namespace, which includes the text at the top of pages such as the "Special:Whatlinkshere" and the page that a blocked user will see when they try to edit a page (MediaWiki:Blockedtext);

• edit the style of the interface by changing the CSS in the monobook stylesheet at MediaWiki:Monobook.css; and

• edit some of the site-wide and skin-specific JavaScript of the software at places like MediaWiki:Common.js.

Other

Users with administrative privileges can also:

• move pages protected against moves;
• view Special:Unwatchedpages to see pages which may be more vulnerable to vandalism; and
• view the history of deleted pages.

Becoming an administrator

If you would like sysop access, add your name to Wikipedia:Requests for adminship according to the guidelines mentioned there, and a discussion will take place by fellow editors to determine if there is consensus that you should become an administrator.

You should write for Wikipedia for a while before requesting administrator status, because other users will have to recognize you before they can agree on trusting you with the tools. Also keep in mind that each language's Wikipedia has its own policies for administrators, which may differ somewhat.

Although multiple user accounts are allowed on Wikipedia in certain circumstances, only one should have administrative tools.

If you have exercised your right to vanish, and return under a new name, your new name can request administrator access by contacting a bureaucrat.

Be careful, please! If you are granted access, you must exercise care in using these functions, especially the ability to delete pages (including images) and their history, and the ability to block IP addresses. You can learn about your newfound powers at the Wikipedia:Administrators' how-to guide. You should also look at the pages linked from the Administrators' reading list before using your administrative abilities.

Security: Administrators, bureaucrats, checkusers, stewards and oversighters are expected to have a strong password. (Particularly since May 7, 2007, when compromised admin accounts deleted the Main Page and put a shock image on every page.)

Places where administrators in particular can assist

Administrator rights can be particularly helpful for working in certain areas of Wikipedia.

• Incidents that may require admin intervention
• 3RR violations
• Intervention against vandalism
• Copyright problems
• Candidate speedy deletion pages
• Administrative backlog
• Administrators will also find their tools useful for RC patrolling.

Other access types

In addition to administrators, there are other types of identified users. See also Wikipedia:User access levels.

IP addresses

Visitors who have not "signed in" can still do most things, including the most important: editing articles and helping with Wikipedia maintenance tasks.

Signed-in users

Signed-up users can do everything IP addresses can do. They can also upload files, start new articles and, once they reach the "autoconfirm" threshold, they can move/rename pages and edit semi-protected pages. See Special:Userlogin to sign up.

Bots

The edits of users with bot status turned on do not show up in recent changes, usually only used for mass edits by bots.

Bureaucrats

Users with "bureaucrat" status can turn other users into sysops (but not remove sysop status), change usernames, and flag and unflag bots accounts. Bureaucrats are created by other bureaucrats on projects where these exist, or by stewards on those who do not yet have one. Sysoppings are recorded in Special:Log/rights or Wikipedia:Bureaucrat log for activity prior to December 24, 2004. Sysoppings by stewards are recorded at Meta:Special:Log/rights but the few stewards who actively sysop users on the English Wikipedia do so using their local bureaucrat status, making this distinction rather academic.

Oversights

Users with the "Oversight" permission can hide revisions of pages from all users. These revisions can temporarily be accessed and reviewed by users with the oversight permission. A log of oversight actions is visible to all Oversights.

Checkusers

Users with the "Checkuser" permission can retrieve the IP addresses used by a username and can also retrieve all edits by users using a certain IP or IP range. A log of Checkuser actions is visible to all Checkusers.

Stewards

Users with "Steward" status can change the access of any user on any Wikimedia project. This includes granting and revoking sysop access and marking users as bots. Their actions are recorded at Special:Log/rights on meta. Requests for their assistance can be made at m:Requests for permissions. Normally, they will not perform actions that can be carried out by local users.

Developers

The highest degree of technical access (actually a group of levels, the difference between all but the lowest of which is not really visible to users) is "developer", for those who can make direct changes to the MediaWiki software and the Wikimedia wiki farm and databases. These people, by and large, do not carry out administrative functions.

They can be contacted via the wikitech-l mailing list. See m:Developers for a partial list of developers and further information.

Dealing with grievances

If a user thinks an administrator has acted improperly against them or another editor, they should express their concerns directly to the administrator responsible and try to come to a resolution in an orderly and civil manner. However, if the matter is not resolved between the two parties, users can take further action according to Wikipedia:Resolving disputes. For more possibilities, see Requests for comment/User conduct: Use of administrator privileges.

Administrator abuse

Administrators can be removed if they misuse their powers. Currently, administrators may be removed either at the request of Jimbo Wales or by a ruling of the Arbitration Committee. At their discretion, lesser penalties may also be assessed against problematic administrators, including the restriction of their use of certain powers or placement on administrative probation. The technical ability to remove administrator status rests with stewards.

There have been alternative procedures suggested for the removal of sysop status, but none of them have achieved consensus. Some administrators will voluntarily stand for reconfirmation under certain circumstances; see Category:Administrators open to recall.

No big deal

An often paraphrased comment about adminship is the following, said by Jimbo Wales in Feb 2003, referring to administrators as sysops:

I just wanted to say that becoming a sysop is *not a big deal*.

I think perhaps I'll go through semi-willy-nilly and make a bunch of people who have been around for awhile sysops. I want to dispel the aura of "authority" around the position. It's merely a technical matter that the powers given to sysops are not given out to everyone.

I don't like that there's the apparent feeling here that being granted sysop status is a really special thing.

— Jimbo Wales, wikimedia.org archive entry, gmane archive entry

Of course, while it is no big deal, one should have earned the community's trust before applying.

See also

• Administrators' how-to guide
• Administrators' reading list
• An essay on what adminship is not
• Wikipedia:Advice for new administrators

Factoid: There are 47,796,202 users on Wikipedia, and only 856 administrators; that's about 55,837 users per admin, or 0.02 administrators per 1,000 users.   Now, administrators aren't police, and most user accounts aren't active, so these stats aren't strictly comparable, but the average ratio in USA cities is 2.5 police officers per 1,000 residents.   So isn't it nice that there's always an administrator around when you need one?