Scroll Wars Wiki:Administrators

Administrators are a class of users that are granted additional priveliges, and are expected to use these abilities to assist in the maintenance of the wiki.

On this wiki, there are two classes of Administrator - sysops (commonly known here as a Moderator), and bureaucrat. For the list of Administrators, see Special:Listusers/sysop.

Page protection
Sysops can edit protected pages and protect and unprotect pages. Protection of a page means that a non-sysop cannot modify it. They can perform this action by clicking the Protection tab on the top of any page.

MediaWiki namespace
As a result, sysops can edit the protected pages in the "MediaWiki:" namespace, which contain the messages that appear at the top of pages such as Special:Whatlinkshere and the page that a blocked user will see when they try to edit a page, as well as many other aspects of the interface.

Page deletion
Sysops can delete pages and their history. They can also view and restore deleted pages and their history.

Sysops can also permanently delete images. This is a non-reversible change: once deleted, always deleted. Note that there is no particular reason that image deletion should not be reversible; this is simply the way the software works at present.

Reversion
Sysops can revert pages quickly. When looking at a user's contributions, a link that looks like this: [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 the edit summary (Reverted edits by X to last version by Y). This expedites the reversion of edits by anonymous vandals. Note, however, that all users can revert pages, only less conveniently. (By using the page history to open the version required, edit page, save.)

Sysops can hide vandalism from the Recent Changes page. To do this, add &bot=1 to the end of the url used to access a user's contributions. For example:

 http://en.wikipedia.org/w/wiki.phtml?title=Special:Contributions&target=Michael&bot=1 

When the rollback links on the contributions list are clicked, both the revert and the original edit that you are reverting will be hidden from the default Recentchanges display. This mechanism uses the marker originally added to keep massive bot edits from flooding recentchanges, hence the "bot". These changes will be hidden from recent changes unless you click the "bots" link to set hidebots=0. The edits are not hidden from contribs, history, watchlist, etc. The edits remain in the database and are not removed, but they no longer flood Recentchanges. The aim of this feature is to reduce the annoyance factor of a flood vandal with relatively little effort.

Block and unblock
Sysops can block usernames. Special:Ipblocklist lists currently blocked addresses and usernames.

While blocking a username traditionally blocks all acounts using the same IP (to prevent users from simply registering a new account to continue), sysops do not have access to information regarding the IP addresses of users, as the IP ban is automatically handled by the software. At present, there is no way to manually check the IP of any given user.

Database queries
Sysops can run read-only queries on the database.

What bureaucrats can do
Bureaucrats can do anything a sysop can do, and have an additional ability as well:

Create new sysops and bureaucrats
Bureaucrats are capable of bestowing sysop status to other users, and are also capable of removing said status as well.