Daily Chat Wiki:Administrators
Administrators (sometimes called admins or sysops) are users who have been promoted and given additional rights and responsibilities on the wiki.
Overview
Administrators are users who have a proven track record of high-quality edits and responsible, mature behavior, and have had performance and security-based restrictions on several features lifted because they seem like hardworking and trustworthy people. This includes the ability to ban vandals or disruptive users, quickly revert damage done to articles, and delete unwanted images or pages (among other functions listed below). Users cannot ask to be promoted: all decisions on promotions and demotions are made by the current staff members, although users are free to decline when offered a promotion.
In general, administrators are not imbued with any special authority and are equal to everyone else in terms of editorial responsibility. Admins should not have power over other users other than applying decisions made by all users, but when they do exercise their authority to enforce established rules and regulations, users should defer to their judgement rather than arguing, edit-warring and making a scene. Administrators are not infallible, however any mistakes made by the wiki staff will be dealt with internally; Users should never attempt to give a staff member an official warning, but instead, voice any legitimate concerns to a bureaucrat in private, such as via their talk page. While warnings given to users by an admin cannot be appealed, the other staff members have the ability to overturn any unwarranted warnings or blocks if they see fit.
Because of their experience, users seeking help will often turn to an administrator for advice and information. During vandal attacks or edit wars, users may contact any staff members who are online for assistance. Although, administrators are expected to keep an eye on Special:RecentChanges as much as possible in order to notice incidents on their own.
Many essential housekeeping chores require the additional editing tools granted to administrators, and users should feel free to ask for assistance if they are not able to perform certain necessary functions on their own, such as having pages protected or unprotected, having redirects deleted to make room for moves, etc. For less pressing matters, Template:Delete can be placed on pages or images requiring deletion, and an admin will get around to it sooner than later, as they are expected to periodically check and empty the "to be deleted" category.
If a staff member retires, they are usually autopatrolled upon their demotion, meaning their edits are still considered trustworthy and are automatically marked as patrolled, like when they were part of the staff. They also retain their access to the staff board on the forum and are encouraged to continue participating in discussions there if they so choose.
Administrator group rights
The wiki software has several important features that are restricted from usage by regular users. This page lists all the restricted features granted to administrators (and other user ranks), but a more comprehensive overview is provided below. Note that many, but not all, of these rights are also possessed by patrollers.
- Protecting and unprotecting pages.
- Directly editing or moving protected pages.
- Deleting pages, files and their history.
- Viewing and restoring deleted pages and page histories.
- Hiding specific revisions of a page from public view, including the associated edit summary if necessary.
- Viewing and restoring hidden revisions.
- Instantly reverting the most recent edits made to a page via rollback (note that any user can manually revert a page to an earlier version, admins can just do it faster).
- Looking up a user's IP address via CheckUser.
- Blocking user accounts, IP addresses and IP ranges for a specific time or indefinitely; see the blocking policy for more information.
- Unblocking user accounts, IP addresses and IP ranges.
- Hiding inappropriate usernames from public view.
- Marking edits as patrolled.
- Having their own edits automatically marked as patrolled.
Current administrators
The following is a list of all current administrators. Bureaucrats are also in this list.
See also
- For information on how to become an administrator, see the FAQ.
- Administrators should also see the administrative base category for reference to policies and more.