Manual:User rights

User rights are specific access and ability permissions that can be assigned to customizable user groups. Groups can then be assigned to (or removed from) users through the Special:Userrights Special page. See Help:Assigning permissions.

Access to this interface is itself governed by the 'userrights' right, so only users in the 'bureaucrat' group can do it (in a default set-up). See Manual:Setting user groups in MediaWiki for information about managing and the assignment of user groups.

This Special:UserRights interface was introduced in MediaWiki 1.5; see Manual:User rights (older versions) for earlier methods.

Changing group permissions
A default MediaWiki installation assigns certain rights to default groups (see below). You can change the default rights by editing the in  with the syntax

(Note: by default install $wgGroupPermissions is not present and you will need to add it into the file)

If a member has multiple groups, they get all of the permissions from each of the groups they are in. All users, including anonymous users, are in the  group; all registered users are in the   group. In addition to the default groups, you can arbitrarily create new groups using the same array.

Examples
This example will disable viewing of all pages not listed in $wgWhitelistRead, then re-enable for registered users only:

This example will disable editing of all pages, then re-enable for users with confirmed e-mail addresses only:

This example will create an arbitrary "ninja" group that can block users and delete pages, and whose edits are hidden by default in the recent changes log:
 * Note: the name cannot contain spaces, so use  or   instead of

In this example, you would probably also want to create pages: This will insure that the group will be referred to as "Ninjas" throughout the interface, and a member will be referred to as a "ninja", and overviews will link the groupname to.
 * (content: )
 * (content: )
 * (content: )

This example will eliminate the bureaucrat group entirely. It is necessary to ensure that all six of these variables are unset for any group that one wishes to remove from being listed at Special:UserGroupRights; however, merely unsetting $wgGroupPermissions will suffice to remove it from Special:UserRights. This code should be placed after any  lines that add extensions such as Extension:Renameuser containing code that gives bureaucrats group permissions by default.

This example disables write access (page editing and creation) by default, creates a group named "Write", and grants it write access. Users can be manually added to this group via Special:UserRights:

List of permissions
The following user rights are available in the latest version of MediaWiki. If you are using an older version, look at "Special:Version" on your wiki and see if your version is covered in the "versions" column.

List of groups
The following groups are available in the latest version of MediaWiki. If you are using an older version then some of these may not be implemented.

From MW 1.12, you can create your own groups into which users are automatically promoted (as with autoconfirmed and emailconfirmed) using $wgAutopromote. You can even create any custom group by just assigning rights to them.

Default rights
The default rights are defined in DefaultSettings.php.
 * Default values in HEAD version:
 * Default values in MediaWiki latest stable version 1.22.0:

Adding new rights
Information for coders only follows.

If you're adding a new right in core, for instance to control a new special page, you are required to add it to the list of available rights in User.php,  (example). If you're doing so in an extension, you instead need to use $wgAvailableRights.

You probably also want to also assign it to some user group by editing $wgGroupPermissions described above.

You also need to add  and   interface messages to /languages/i18n/en.json (with documentation in qqq.json). The right-* messages can be seen on Special:ListGroupRights and the action-* messages are used in a sentence like "You do not have permission to ...".