Manual:Administrators/en

Administrators are wiki users who are members of the "sysop" user group. The wiki software has few features which are only accessible to these users, but they are quite important.

Protection
Administrators can edit protected pages and have the ability to protect and unprotect pages from editing and moving.

Versions of edit protection are:

Procedure

Notes

Configuration

Deletion

 * See also: Help:Sysop deleting and undeleting

Administrators can delete pages and their history, and can view and restore deleted pages and their history. They can also delete images, which can be undeleted as normal.

Procedure
 * To delete a page, click the delete link on the page that is to be deleted. If an administrator is using the monobook skin, the shortcut alt+d can alternatively be used. This will bring up a new page asking for a confirmation that the page should be deleted, as well as an explanation of the deletion. A message should be typed into the input box to explain the deletion to other users. After the page has been deleted, it might have an existing talk page which should be deleted as well. Any links that point to the deleted page should be removed or corrected—whichever is the most appropriate action.
 * Pages can be undeleted for as long as they are in the archive. This archive is occasionally lost in database crashes. If a page has not been recreated since it was deleted, there will be a message on the page indicating how many deleted revisions there are. Clicking on this (or the undelete tab) will bring up a page displaying all the deleted revisions which can each be looked at separately. To undelete a page, click the restore button which appears on the confirmation page; this will restore all deleted revisions by default. Undeletion occurs as soon as the button is clicked, and will be logged just like deletions; if some revisions are not restored, the log will record how many were restored. If a page already exists but an administrator wants to restore previous revisions, the administrator must go to the page history. There will be a link to undelete as described above.

Notes
 * '''Delete revisions
 * Delete article revisions
 * Delete article revisions for the first time: To delete/keep just one or more revisions from the history, delete the article normally, then begin the undeletion procedure. Before clicking the "Restore" button, check the revisions you want to restore—all others will remain deleted.
 * Delete article revisions not for the first time: if the article already contains previously deleted revisions, be sure to follow Selective deletion on Wikipedia.
 * Delete image revisions: To delete one version of an image, click the (del) link beside that version under the "File history" heading. The most recent version cannot be deleted without deleting all previous versions.
 * Merge edit histories: the edit histories of two articles may be merged into one. To merge histories, delete the page where all the histories are supposed to be restored. Move the other page to the page just deleted, and then restore all the deleted revisions. This cannot be manually undone, and it is very difficult to split edit histories.
 * Split an edit history: To split an edit history, manually delete all revisions, then restore those belonging to one article (which may be difficult to recognize). Move the undeleted page to a new title to split off those revisions. Restore the revisions belonging to the deleted page (now a redirect), then revert to a the penultimate revision (before the redirect).

Rollback
Any user can revert a page by going back through the page's history. Administrators have a rollback button to expedite the process. To revert the edits of one user to the last version by the previous editor, click rollback on the page history, the user contribution list, or on the diff page. The reversion will be marked as a minor edit and given an automatic edit summary based on the contents of Revertpage.

Sysops (and other users with right "markbotedits") can hide edits (typically, vandalism) from the Recent Changes page. To do this, add &bot=1 to the end of the url used to access a user's contributions. For example,  ...index.php?title=Special:Contributions&target=Username&bot=1 . When the rollback links on the contributions list are clicked, both the revert and the original edit that you are reverting will be hidden from the default Recentchanges display. This mechanism uses the marker originally added to keep massive bot edits from flooding recentchanges, hence the "bot". These changes will be hidden from recent changes unless you click the "bots" link to set hidebots=0. The edits are not hidden from contribs, history, watchlist, etc. The edits remain in the database and are not removed, but they no longer flood Recentchanges. The aim of this feature is to reduce the annoyance factor of a flood vandal with relatively little effort.

Block and unblock

 * See Manual:Block and unblock.

Making sysops
There is a simple interface (Special:Userrights) for granting a specific username 'sysop' status or (in MediaWiki 1.11) granting and revoking membership to groups with all associated user rights - a user with 'Bureaucrat' status has the rights to do to this. The initial user created by the installer should have 'Bureaucrat' rights.

Older versions of Mediawiki before 1.11 required you to manipulate the database records within MySQL in order to grant users certain rights.

Signed-in privileges
Users with ordinary access, including visitors who haven't "signed in", can still do many things, including the most important: editing pages and helping with maintenance tasks. But only signed-up users can upload files or rename pages.