Help:Permissions

This wiki has a variety of account permissions that have been created to assist in it's administration. If a particular permission does not have usage guidelines, it is either because it is anticipated a limited set of users will ever have it, or because usage does not necessarily require written rules.

Bureaucrat

The only people capable of granting and revoking any permissions listed below are bureaucrats. Such individuals may grant and revoke at their sole discretion. They can also perform an enhanced version of revision deletion called suppression, which allows hiding deleted information from even administrators, reserved for getting rid of personally identifiable information.

This permission is strictly controlled, not due to a lack of trust, but due to a lack of need for many people to have it. A bureaucrat account being compromised could cause substantial damage which may not be reversible, and so limited granting is also in the interest of site security. While anyone is permitted to ask to become a bureaucrat, odds are greater than normal that it'll be denied.

The following individuals in the Endurance Coalition are bureaucrats.

• Sirdog (sirdog3355)

Administrator

An administrator is a functional janitor for the wiki. They are able to block user accounts (which restrict all editing and usage of any advanced permissions), protect pages from editing (and subsequently edit any protected page), and are able to delete and restore pages and revisions. This makes it considerably easier to control the wiki's organization than a regular user is capable of doing.

Usage of the page protection and deletion tools are at administrator discretion (with an expectation of working in tandem with fellow administrators and other wiki-enthusiasts). The actual use of the tools are explained at Manual:Administrators (though note not all permissions the page states administrators have are actually available on this wiki). Administrators should be aware that deletion is not permanent, and accidental or ignorant deletion is not something to fear. All pages can be undeleted. To delete specific revisions, see Help:RevisionDelete.

Usage guidelines

Administrators should never block to punish, but as a means of stopping disruption from an account — usually in response to an account compromise, the account owner lashing out emotionally, or the account owner acting abusively in response to some falling out with the Endurance Coalition or any specific member. This is performed at Special:Block.

Interface administrator

An interface administrator has no correlation with a regular administrator, and are simply editors who can edit interface pages (e.g the Module: and MediaWiki: namespace) and import pages from other MediaWiki sites.

Edit filter manager

An edit filter manager is able to create and edit abuse filters at Special:AbuseFilter. They can also view and edit the private filters. The abuse filter is a set of regular expression filters that perform defined actions based on a given pattern. This wiki uses a limited number of filters to try and stop particular behaviors which may case harm. Filters are marked private by edit filter managers at their discretion, and it tends to be based on vibes, or whether the ability to see the regex will result in easy bypassing.

Account specialist

An account specialist is able to create accounts for users and edit accounts so as to assist with account recovery. Account creation is done through Special:CreateAccount and editing is done through Special:EditAccount, and does not permit editing of account permissions. All permissions available to account specialists are bundled into the bureaucrat permission. This permission is particularly easy to ask for due to it's limited scope.