Help talk:Assigning permissions

Discuss Help:Assigning permissions

User Rights and Bureaucrats
The section about having permissions to access Special:UserRights isn't quite right. You really need to be in a group that has the 'userrights' permission. By default in a MediaWiki installation (and on all the WikiMedia family of wikis) this means you need to be in the 'Bureaucrat' group. On a private wiki though the local administrator might have changed the default groups. When in doubt, ask an administrator how you can change user rights. If you administer your own wiki, see Manual:User rights for more info. --Cneubauer 13:01, 11 June 2008


 * Yeah it's a problem with this page, that pretty much everything described here is actually very configurable, and so may not be true at all on any particular wiki. We could try to insert caveats saying "(this may be configured differently)". We've done this a little bit throughout the help pages. But I think on this page every other sentence would need to say that!
 * It comes back to the question of where these pages are going to get used. Personally I'm hoping these help pages could/should be distributed to wikis as part of an initial set-up, and for the most part will be giving help on wikis where there hasn't been much clever customisation going on anyway. I think the most helpful thing we can do is to just describe the default set-up, and how it is intended to be used. Other people have different ideas, but I've been writing content with that aim in mind. -- Harry Wood 13:27, 11 June 2008 (UTC)


 * Yeah, I guess it goes back to who the target audience is, users of Wikipedia or users of MediaWiki in general. Hopefully, anyone that runs into a problem with this will read far enough down the page to find the link to Manual:User rights.  I don't have a problem with just describing the default setup as long as its obvious that the default set-up might be customized on any specific wiki.  A tip like the one on the bottom of the page pointing to the corresponding manual page is probably good enough.  I'll have to think about it some more.  As a side note, if you search this site for "permissions", the first page that pops up is Extension:Permissions.  A redirect from Permissions to this page would probably fix that.  --Cneubauer 13:47, 11 June 2008 (UTC)


 * I was pondering some kind of php coded help system which would read the local configuration and adjust the help text accordingly. hmmm. bit tricky.
 * Search can be a bit useless can't it? Well I've just created a kind of disambigation page on Permissions to solve that. I did something similar on a page called "Namespaces" a while back
 * - Harry Wood 15:52, 11 June 2008 (UTC)

Ha! Didn't take long for someone to chip in a note about how this is only true of the default set up. As I say, that caveat appplies to pretty much every sentence on this page, so...   I've added a note within the admin tip box, and moved that up to the near the top of the page to be more prominent. -- Harry Wood 09:23, 12 June 2008 (UTC)

Special:UserRights Broken in 1.20.1
MySQL 5.0.95, RedHat Linux Enterprise 6, PHP 5.3.3

Clean install, pulling up a user name in this screen, checking a box and submitting has no effect. Also in my Navicat (GUI database tool) I can't directly modify the xx_group field. It only works if I run an actual query.

Administrators and Bureaucrats – Not good titles in all languages
My suggestion is to change the names to Administrators (no change) and Administrative officials. I'm not going to argue here because I'm probably on the wrong side anyway. I have never really understood exactly what this people do, only about what they do and that they are needed. As I understand it Bureaucrats have a higher level of executive power. --Caspiax (talk) 02:51, 16 September 2014 (UTC)
 * Indeed you didn't understand. :) Naming is a complex matter, it will not change in English but if you want to translate differently in some language you "just" have to find consensus among the users in that language (usually in translatewiki.net translators, other Wikipedia users and so on). --Nemo 05:25, 16 September 2014 (UTC)