Imw:Administrators

From Imw

Revision as of 19:15, 31 October 2006

We invite requests for adminship.

If you are seeking help from an administrator, please place a message on the request for administrator attention page and an administrator will assist you.

So, what's the deal?

Administrators, or sysops, are active and regular users who have access to technical features that help with maintenance. Administrators are expected to respect and be familiar with IMW policy as they are known and trusted members of the community. They can protect and delete pages, block other editors, and undo these actions as well. By default, these privileges are granted indefinitely and are only removed under exceptional circumstances involving high level intervention.

Since we're in the very early days of IMW, all users should function as administrators in principle; any user can behave in a way befitting an administrator (provided they do not falsely claim to be one), even if they have not been given the extra administrative functions. Admins should never develop into a special subgroup of the community but should be a part of the community like anyone else. However, they are equipped with a few more tools to do some chores that would potentially be harmful if everyone were entrusted with them.

The community does look to administrators to perform essential housekeeping chores that require the extra access administrators are entrusted with. Among them are enforcing rulings made by the community of IMW, keeping an eye on new and changed articles to swiftly delete obvious vandalism, and meeting user requests for help that require administrative access. Since administrators are expected to be trusted and experienced members of the community, users seeking help will often turn to an administrator for advice and information. In general, administrators acting in this role are neutral. They do not have any direct involvement in the issues they are helping people with.

The wiki software has a few important features that are restricted. Of those restricted features, administrators have access to the following.

Protected pages

• Edit the Main Page, and other protected pages. You can suggest Main Page changes at Talk:Main Page. The welcome page has the potential to receive a lot of vandalism; protecting it is an unfortunate compromise to keep our main page free of random profanity.

• Protect and unprotect pages. Pages are only protected in certain rare circumstances - for information and guidelines, see Protection.

Deletion and undeletion

• Delete pages, including images, and their history. For information and guidelines, see IMW:Deletion policy. To suggest a page for deletion (after reading the policy and guidelines pages!), see IMW:Articles for deletion. Sometimes deletion is a technical matter, in which a redirection page has to be removed to make way for renaming an article, or a page whose history has been broken up has to be deleted and the pieces recombined. Other times it's a matter of cleaning up simple junk edits on pages with no actual content, or removing material that has been pasted in from another site and infringes copyright (this page is at Wikipedia).

• View and restore deleted pages, including images, and their history. To challenge an already made decision to delete a page, see this page.

Block and unblock

• Block IP addresses, IP ranges, and user accounts, for a specific time or indefinitely.

• Unblock IP addresses, IP ranges, and user accounts.

• See Special:Ipblocklist for currently blocked addresses and usernames

Reverting

• Revert pages quickly. Any user (logged-in or not) can revert a page to an earlier version. Administrators have a faster, automated reversion tool to help them revert vandalism by anonymous editors. When looking at a user's contributions, a link that looks like: [rollback] – appears next to edits that are at the top of the edit history. Clicking on the link reverts to the last edit not authored by that user, with an edit summary of (Reverted edits by X to last version by Y) and marks it as a minor change. One-click rollback is only intended for vandalism, spam, etc.; if reverting over disputed content, it should be done manually with an appropriate edit summary.

Keeping vandalism out of recent changes

• Admins can exclude bulk vandalism from Recent changes. To do this, add &bot=1 to the end of the URL used to access a user's contributions. When the rollback links on the contributions list are clicked, the revert and the original edit that you are reverting will both be hidden from the default recent changes display. The edits are not hidden from contributions lists, page histories or watchlists. The edits remain in the database and are not removed, but they no longer flood recent changes. The aim of this feature is to reduce the annoyance factor of a flood vandal with relatively little effort. This should not be used for reverting a change you just don't like, but is meant only for simple vandalism, particularly massive flood vandalism.

Other

There are various other actions which only those with administrator privileges can perform:

• Can move category pages and other move protected pages.
• Can view the history of deleted pages.

Becoming an administrator

If you have been around for a while and you would like sysop access, let the founder of IMW know on his talk page, with a brief description of yourself and your qualifications.

It is recommended that you write for IMW (or at least some other Wiki) for a while before requesting administrator status, since other users will have to recognize you before they can agree on trusting you with the tools. Although multiple user accounts are allowed on IMW in certain circumstances, only one should have admin powers beyond being an editor.

Be careful, please! If you are granted access, you must exercise care in using these functions, especially the ability to delete pages and their history, to delete images, and the ability to block IP addresses. You can learn about your newfound powers at the Wikipedia:Administrators' how-to guide (from Wikipedia). You should also take a look at the pages linked from the Administrators' reading list (also from Wikipedia) before using any of your admin abilities.

Dealing with grievances

If you think an administrator has acted improperly against you or another editor, you should express your concerns directly to the administrator responsible. Try to come to a resolution in an orderly and civil manner. However, if the matter is not resolved between the two parties, you can take further action according to IMW:Requests for administrator attention.

Administrator abuse

Administrators can be removed if they misuse their powers. Currently, administrators may be removed at the request of the IMW community. At their discretion, lesser penalties may also be assessed against problematic administrators.

See also Special:Listusers/sysop.