Festipedia:Administrators

Administrators, commonly known as admins and also called sysops (system operators), are volunteers who have access to technical features that help with maintenance of this wiki. They can protect and delete pages and block other editors.

Administrator tools

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

Protected pages

• Edit protected pages.

• Protect and unprotect pages, with different kinds of protection against editing by certain classes of users, and page moving. Pages are generally protected rarely and temporarily.

Deletion

• Delete 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

• Revert pages to a previous version 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. 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 (talk) to last version by Y) and marks it as a minor change. One-click rollback is mainly intended for vandalism, spam, etc. Disputed content deserves an explanation, either in the edit summary or on the talk page, and it is not nice to omit that (either by rolling back, or by leaving the summary field blank).

Design and wording of the interface

Administrators can:

• change the text of the interface by editing the pages in the FestWiki namespace, which includes the text 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 (MediaWiki:Blockedtext);

• edit the style of the interface by changing the stylesheets and

• edit some of the site-wide and skin-specific JavaScript of the software at places like MediaWiki:Common.js.

Other

Users with administrative privileges can also:

• move pages protected against moves; and
• view Special:Unwatchedpages to see pages which may be more vulnerable to vandalism.

Becoming an administrator

The three original administrators of Festipedia were members of the Heritage Group committee. However, the majority of administrative tasks have historically been carried out by just one of the administrators. This is not sustainable for the long term. Additional active administrators would be appreciated.

There are no official requirements to become an administrator. Initially, anyone wanting to volunteer to become an administrator should contact [User:Peter Harrison]. His decision is final.

Longer term a process is needed whereby the community can decide who should be an administrator. This should be much simpler than the process for Wikipedia. Users can nominate themselves by editing Festipedia:Requests for adminship.