Wikicpa:Administrators
From Wikicpa
Administrators are WikiCPA users who have access to technical features that help with maintenance. Those include protecting and deleting pages, blocking other editors, and undoing these actions as well. WikiCPA practice is to grant this access to anyone who has been an active and regular WikiCPA contributor for a while, is familiar with and respects WikiCPA policy, and is generally a known and trusted member of the community.
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So, what's the deal?
The wiki software has a few important features that are restricted. Of those restricted features only administrators have access to the following.
Protected pages
- Edit the Main Page. You can suggest changes at Talk:Main Page. The main page could receive a lot of vandalism; protecting it is an unfortunate compromise to keep our welcome mat free of random profanity.
- Protect and unprotect pages. Pages are only protected in certain rare circumstances.
Deletion and undeletion
- Delete pages, including images, and their history. 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 upon WikiCPA's copyright restrictions.
- View and restore deleted pages, including images, and their history.
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.
Reverting
- Reverting 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.
- Do not use one-click rollback on edits that are not simple vandalism; please use manual rollback with an appropriate edit summary.
Hiding vandalism from recent changes
- Administrators can hide vandalism from Recent changes. To do this, add &bot=1 to the end of the URL used to access a user's contributions. For example, http://wikicpa.com/w/index.php?title=Special:Contributions&target=Example&bot=1. 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 bot marker was originally added to keep 'bot' edits from flooding recent changes, hence the "bot".) This means that they will be hidden from recent changes unless you click the "bots" link to set hidebots=0. 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 Special:Unwatchedpages to see pages which may be more vulnerable to vandalism
- Can view the history of deleted pages
Becoming an administrator
If you have been around for a while and you would like sysop access, add your name to Wikicpa:Requests for adminship according to the guidelines mentioned there, and a discussion will take place by fellow editors in order to determine if there is consensus that you should become an administrator.
It is recommended that you write for WikiCPA for a while before requesting administrator status, since other users will have to recognize you before they can agree on your promotion.
Although multiple user accounts are allowed on WikiCPA in certain circumstances, only one should have admin powers beyond being an editor. Be careful, please! If you are granted access, we ask that you exercise care in using these functions, especially the ability to delete pages and their history, to delete images (which is permanent!), and the ability to block IP addresses.
