Manual:User rights

User rights are specific access and ability permissions that can be assigned to customizable groups. Groups can then be assigned to (or removed from) users through the Special:Userrights interface in the wiki software. 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:User rights management for information about managing and the assignment of user groups.

This Special:Userrights interface was introduced in MediaWiki 1.5; see Manual:User rights management 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

If a member has multiple groups, they get the highest permission of any groups. 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:

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.

Default rights
The default rights are defined in DefaultSettings.php. MediaWiki 1.14.0 defines the following (for older versions see Manual:$wgGroupPermissions).