Manual:User rights

User rights are specific access and ability permissions that can be assigned to customizable groups, which can then be assigned to (or removed from) users through the Special:Userrights interface. For example, the default bureaucrat group enables the use of the User rights interface.

This feature was introduced in MediaWiki 1.5; see setting user rights in MediaWiki on the Meta-wiki for earlier methods.

Managing groups
A default MediaWiki installation assigns certain rights to default groups (see below). You can change the default rights by declaring the in  with the syntax " ". To change permissions for all groups, use "*" as the group. For example, to disable editing for all users, add " ".

In addition to the default groups, you can arbitrarily create new groups using the same array. For example:

Rights and groups
The following user rights are available:

The following groups are available:

Default rights
The default rights are defined in DefaultSettings.php. MediaWiki 1.11alpha defines the following:

Anonymous users cannot view pages
This example will disable viewing of all pages not listed in, then re-enable for registered users only.

Anonymous users can only comment
This example will disable editing of content pages for all users, then re-enable it for registered users only.