Wikipedia:User access levels

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Shortcut: WP:UAL

A contributor's access to perform certain actions in Wikipedia is determined by various flags on their account, some of which are automatic and others of which must be given to them manually. A user with a flag is said to be a member of that flag's 'user group', giving them certain 'permissions' and the use of certain features of the MediaWiki software.

Users are assigned the highest possible permissions based on the groups they are members of. A user who is an administrator, bureaucrat and rollbacker, for instance, would be able to use Special:Unwatchedpages (granted with the 'sysop' group), Special:RenameUser (granted with the 'bureaucrat' group) and to also use rollback (granted with the 'sysop' and 'rollbacker' groups). If the user was removed from the 'sysop' group, he would still be able to use rollback, because he is still a member of the 'rollbacker' group.

Membership in a user group is sometimes referred to as a "flag" or "bit"; being made a member of the 'sysop' group is synonymous with being "given the admin bit" or "receiving the admin flag"

Overview

All visitors to the site, including anonymous users, are part of the '*' group, while all logged-in users are also part of the 'user' group. Users are automatically promoted into the Autoconfirmed/Established users group when their account is four days old and has ten edits. Other flags are only given upon request; some, such as 'rollbacker' or 'bot', are granted unilaterally if the user demonstrates a need for them (see Wikipedia:Requests for permissions‎ and Wikipedia:Bots/Requests for approval). Others, such as 'sysop' and 'bureaucrat', are given only after community discussion and consensus at Wikipedia:Requests for adminship. Users are only made members of groups such as 'oversight' and 'checkuser' with the approval of the Arbitration Committee and after confirming their identity with the Wikimedia Foundation.

User groups

Regular user levels

Anonymous users

Contributors who have not created an account or logged in may read all Wikipedia pages (except restricted Special pages), and edit pages that are not protected or semi-protected. They may create talk pages in any talk namespace but may need to ask for help to create pages in some parts of the wiki. They cannot upload files or images. They must answer a CAPTCHA if they wish to make an edit which involves the addition of one or more external links, and click a confirm link to purge pages. All users may also query the site API in 500-record batches.

New users

A user who edits through an account they have registered, may immediately create pages in any namespace (except the MediaWiki namespace) and may also e-mail other users if they activate an email address in their user preferences. All logged-in users may mark edits as minor. They may purge pages without a confirmation step, but are still required to answer a CAPTCHA when adding external links. They may also customize their Wikimedia interface and its options as they wish, via Special:Preferences or by adding personal CSS or JavaScript rules to their mono book.css or mono book.js files.

Autoconfirmed users

A number of actions on the English Wikipedia are restricted to user accounts which pass certain thresholds for age and editcount: users who meet these requirements are considered part of the pseudo-group autoconfirmed. Autoconfirmed status is checked every time the user performs a restricted action: consequently, it is granted automatically by the software and cannot be removed. The precise requirements for autoconfirmed status vary according to circumstances: for most users on en.wiki, accounts which are more than 4 days old and have made at least 10 edits are considered autoconfirmed. However, users editing through a Tor network are subjected to much stricter autoconfirmed thresholds: currently 90 days and 100 edits.

Autoconfirmed status is required to move pages, edit semi-protected pages, and upload files or upload a new version of an existing file. Autoconfirmed users are no longer required to enter a CAPTCHA for most events. Autoconfirmed users may also mark pages as patrolled in Special:NewPages.

Administrators, bureaucrats and stewards

Administrators

See also: Wikipedia:Administrators

Administrator rights are granted by the community to users requesting them. The process involves considerable discussion and examination of their activities as an editor. Users who are members of the 'administrator' user group have access to a number of tools to allow them to carry out certain functions on the wiki. The tools cover processes such as page deletion, page protection, blocking and unblocking, access to modify protected pages and the mediawiki interface, and the ability to grant and remove rollback and ipblock-exempt rights to other users. Administrators are otherwise no different from any other editor.

Administrators are also known historically as "sysops" (system operators). The two terms are used interchangeably.

See Special:Listusers/sysop for a list of users in this group.

Bureaucrats

See also: Wikipedia:Bureaucrats

Bureaucrat rights are granted by the community to exceptionally trusted users who are allowed to perform certain actions on other users' accounts.

Bureaucrats have extended access to Special:UserRights, enabling them to add users to the 'sysop' and 'bureaucrat' groups (but not remove them), and both add users to and remove users from the 'bot' user group. They may also use Special:MakeSysop and Special:MakeBot for the same purposes. Bureaucrats can use Special:RenameUser to rename users (including themselves).

See Special:Listusers/bureaucrat for a list of users in this group.

Stewards

See also: meta:Steward

Stewardship is an elected role, and stewards are appointed globally across all Wikimedia Foundation wikis.

Users who are members of the 'steward' user group may grant and revoke any permission to or from any user on any wiki operated by the Wikimedia Foundation. This group is set on MetaWiki, and may use meta:Special:Userrights to set permissions on any wikimedia wiki; they may add or remove any user from any group. Stewards generally act only when there is no user on a particular wiki that can make the necessary change. This includes granting of the 'administrator' or 'bureaucrat' access levels on wikis which do not have any local bureaucrats, and removing such flags if the user resigns or the account is acting maliciously. Stewards are also responsible for granting and revoking access levels such as 'oversight' and 'checkuser', as no other group is capable of making such changes.

Stewards can also act as checkusers or oversighters on wikis which do not have local members of those groups. If a wiki has a passing need for an edit to be oversighted, for instance, a steward can add themselves to the 'oversight' user group on that wiki, perform the necessary oversight activity using Special:HideRevision, and then remove themselves from the 'oversight' group using their steward rights.

All steward actions are logged at meta:Special:Log/rights. See Special:Globalusers/steward for a list of users in this group.

Other flags giving access to specialized functions

Rollback

See also: Wikipedia:Rollback feature

Users who are given the rollback flag ('rollbacker' user group) may revert revisions using the rollback feature.

See Special:Listusers/rollbacker for a list of users in this group.

Ipblock-exempt

See also: Wikipedia:IP block exemption

Users who are given the ipblock-exempt flag ('ipblock-exempt' user group) are not affected by autoblocks and blocks of IP addresses and ranges that aren't made with the "anonymous users only" setting.

See Special:Listusers/ipblock-exempt for a list of users in this group.

Accountcreator

See also: Wikipedia:Request an account

Users who are given the accountcreator flag ('accountcreator' user group) are not affected by the 6 account creation limit per day per IP, and can create accounts for other users without restriction. Users in this group can also over-ride the anti-spoof checks on account creation.

See Special:Listusers/accountcreator for a list of users in this group.

Uploader

See also: Wikipedia:Uploaders

The 'upload' flag was created because of the fact that newly registered users must wait four days and make ten edits before becoming promoted and able to upload files. This flag created the ability to assign the autoconfirmed permission after a discussion on the Village Pump. This feature cannot be assigned by administrators yet, only by stewards.

See Special:Listusers/uploader for a list of users in this group.

Oversight

See also: Wikipedia:Oversight

Users who are given the oversight flag ('oversight' user group) have access to Special:HideRevision, through which they can permanently hide revisions of pages from all users, and Special:Oversight, where they can view a log of such actions and the content of the hidden revisions. This right is only granted to exceedingly few users who are age 18+ and have identified themselves to the Wikimedia Foundation.

See Special:Listusers/oversight for a list of users in this group.

CheckUser

See also: Wikipedia:Checkuser and meta:CheckUser policy

Users who are given the checkuser flag ('checkuser' user group) have access to Special:CheckUser. They are able to view a list of all IP addresses used by a user account to edit the English wikipedia, a list of all edits made by an IP, or all user accounts that have used an IP address. They may also view a log of such requests. This right is only granted to exceedingly few users who are age 18+ and have identified themselves to the Wikimedia Foundation.

See Special:Listusers/checkuser for a list of users in this group.

Importers and Transwiki

Transwiki and Importers are unused flags which give permissions on Special:Import. Although Mediawiki software provides the ability to import articles directly from XML, this is disabled on en.wikipedia as well as most other Wikimedia wiki projects. On en.wikipedia, these flags would only allow access to a disabled page, so they are unused.

Instead of Special:Import, en.wikipedia uses an alternative method to move information across wikimedia wikis. See Transwiki log.

For more information on the Import function, see Help:Import on Meta.

Other flagged accounts

Bots

See also: Wikipedia:Bot policy

Accounts used by approved bots to make pre-approved edits can be flagged as such. Bot accounts are automated or semi-automated, the nature of their edits is well defined, and they will be quickly blocked if their actions vary from their given tasks, so they need less scrutiny than human edits.

For this reason, contributions from accounts with the bot flag ('bot' user group) are not displayed in recent changes or watchlists to users who have opted to hide bot edits. Minor edits made by bot accounts to user talk pages do not trigger the "you have new messages" banner. Bot accounts can query the API in batches of 5,000 rather than 500.

See Special:Listusers/bot for a list of users in this group.

Developers

See also: meta:Developers

There are a number of development areas of some sort to which access is limited, which are not specific to any particular wiki. SVN commit access allows the development version of the MediaWiki software to be modified, toolserver access allows applications to be uploaded to and run on the toolserver, and a small number of people have shell access to the servers on which Wikipedia and the other projects of the Wikimedia Foundation are hosted.

Several of the Wikimedia developers with root access to the wikimedia servers are granted permissions without using the normal approval channels, as the rights they infer are merely safer or more efficient alternatives to modifying the database directly. For instance, Tim Starling, Brion Vibber, Kate and RobH have 'steward' rights although they were not elected.

The 'developer' user group exists on all Wikimedia projects, but it is not usually populated. If a developer needs access to a specific permission on wikipedia, they can assign the permission to the 'developer' group, then add themselves to the group using steward rights. Permissions which have been assigned to the 'developer' group include siteadmin, which enables them to rename users with more than 200,000 edits.

A (usually empty) list of users in the 'developer' group can be found at Special:Listusers/developer

Founder

The 'founder' group was created on the English Wikipedia by developer Tim Starling, as a unique group for Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales. The group gives Wales full access to Special:UserRights and Special:Makesysop. As Wales is also a steward on Meta, he has the ability to change the user rights of any editor on any wikimedia wiki from meta:Special:UserRights, making the 'founder' group largely a status symbol. However, as "founder actions" are usually of great interest to the local community, and are only relevant to the English Wikipedia, the 'founder' right also has the benefit of allowing Wales' actions to be visible in the english wikipedia rights log; actions performed with the steward bit are not visible in that record, but only on the log at metawiki.

Table

As a function of the Requests for adminship and Requests for Bureaucratship processes, all bureaucrats on the English Wikipedia are also administrators, and so have all the permissions of the 'sysop' user group in addition to those rights from the 'bureaucrat' group. However this is not a requirement of the MediaWiki software; it is technically possible for a user to be a bureaucrat without also being an admin.
Deprecated permissions are either no longer assigned to any group, or the group to which they are assigned is no longer populated.

Granted	Inherited	Denied	Revoked	Depends	Limited

v • d • e Permission	Allows user(s) to…	Registered accounts	Administrators	Bureaucrats	other groups
apihighlimits	request API queries in batches of 5,000, rather than 500
autopatrol	automatically mark all edits made by the user as patrolled
bigdelete	delete pages with over 5,000 revisions				steward
block	block an IP address, user name, or range of IPs, from editing
boardvote	check IPs and strike out votes during Board elections				boardvote
bot	edit without their edits showing up in recent changes
checkuser	see all IP addresses used by a registered user or to show all edits from a given IP address				checkuser
createaccount	create a new user account for themselves or another user
createpage	create a new page
createtalk	create a new talk page
delete	delete a page with ≤ 5,000 revisions
deletedhistory	view the history of a deleted page or a user's deleted contributions
edit	edit any page which is not protected
editinterface	edit the MediaWiki namespace to affect the interface
editusercssjs	edit .css or .js subpages of other users
-	e-mail a user (using `Special:EmailUser/username`) who have associated an email address with themselves
hiderevision	permanently hide revisions from public view				oversight
import	import pages from a locally stored XML file				import
ipblockexempt	be unaffected by blocks applied to the user's IP address or a range (CIDR) containing it.				Ipblock-exempt
makebot	set/remove bot flags for accounts
makesysop	make editors admins/bureaucrats
markbotedit	mark rollback as bot edits, to keep them out of recent changes
minoredit	make an edit marked as 'minor'
move	change the title of a page by moving it
nominornewtalk	minor edits by this user to user talk pages do not trigger the "you have new messages" banner
override-antispoof	blocks the creation of accounts with mixed-script, confusing and similar usernames				account creator
oversight	view revisions such that have been permanently hidden				oversight
patrol	state that they have checked a page that appeared in Special:Newpages
protect	change protection levels, edit and move protected pages
purge	purge a page by adding `&action=purge` to the URL
read	read pages
renameuser	change the name of an existing account
rollback	use a special link to more easily revert a bad edit				rollbacker
siteadmin	use Special:LockDB to lock the database or Special:UnlockDB to unlock the database				developer
undelete	undelete a previously deleted page or specific revisions from it, view deleted revisions
unwatchedpages	view a list of pages which are not on anyone's watchlist
upload	upload a media file, or overwrite an existing unprotected file	if uploader			uploader
userrights	change the user groups of another user		+/− rollbacker, +/− Ipblock-exempt, +/− Accountcreator	+ bureaucrat, + sysop, +/− bot	steward +/− any