Help:Administrators' how-to guide

Every founder of a Wikia has administrator access on the wiki they founded. Other users may also be granted this access, by the founder, or by another bureaucrat. This page is a basic how-to guide to using your admin powers. This page explains how to carry out sysop actions, and does not cover the policies that you must follow before doing these. Ensure you are aware of the relevant policies on your wiki before doing anything described on this page.

Deleting a page

 * 1) Click the delete or delete this page link on the page you want to delete. (If you are using the monobook skin with English as your default language, you can use the shortcut alt+d.)


 * 1) You will be shown a page with a box to type in the reason for deletion, and a confirm box. This page will give you a warning if the page has more than one revision in its history. If something looks like nonsense but has a page history, check the history before deleting it! The revision you are looking at could be just a vandalised version of a real article.


 * 1) Type your reason for deletion in the box provided. If it is a very short page, the box will contain the page text. For pages that are obviously vandalism, you may wish to leave the full text as the reason. In other cases, you should specify why you are deleting it. (For example, "this page is not about the subject of this wiki" or "this page is a copyright violation".)


 * 1) After you have deleted the page, check to see if it has a talk page. If it does, delete this too.


 * 1) If the page is being deleted because it should not exist, check that nothing links to it to prevent it being created again.


 * 1) Follow any other guidelines for deleting page on your wiki, which may include archiving a deletion discussion.

Deleting an image
A common mistake made by new sysops is to delete the image description page instead of the image. An image description page has a delete link like any other page. Do not use this!

To delete an older revision of an image, you must click the del link which appears next to the image.

If there is more than one revision of an image, clicking the "Delete all revisions of this image" will do exactly that. You can not delete the most recent one without deleting all older copies as well, and also deleting the image description page.

After clicking Delete all revisions of this image, you will see a confirmation screen similar to that used for page deletion and the deletion will be logged at Special:Log/delete.

Image deletion is not reversible so please be careful when doing this.

Undeleting a page
Pages can be undeleted for as long as they are in the archive. This archive is occasionally cleared out.

If a page has not been recreated since it was deleted, there will be a message on the page telling you how many deleted revisions there are. Clicking on this will take you to a page which displays the deleted revisions. You can look at each revision separately, and choose whether to undelete all revisions (the default) or selected ones. You undelete a page by clicking the restore button which appears on the confirmation page. Undeletion occurs as soon as you click this; there is no further confirmation screen or a place to type a reason. If you do not undelete all revisions, the log will record how many you did restore.

If a page already exists but you want to undelete previous revisions of it, go to the page history. There you will see the link to undelete as described above. You can also type the full URL to undelete. For example http://www.wikicities.com/index.php?title=Special:Undelete&target=Foo.

See also Wikipedia:Viewing and restoring deleted pages by sysops.

Merging page histories
Merging page histories is a means of fixing cut and paste moves. Basically, it involves deleting a page, moving another page there and undeleting the original over the top of the one you just moved. This action is not reversible so please do not attempt it unless you understand the procedure described at Wikipedia:How to fix cut and paste moves.

Protecting or unprotecting a page
To protect a page, click the protect or protect this page link. It is a common mistake to protect pages unnecessarily.

If you are using the monobook skin, you can use the shortcut alt+=. This will lead to a confirmation screen very similar to the one used for deletion. Enter the reason for protection in the box, check the confirm box and press confirm. This will be logged at Special:Log/protect, but you should also note it at Protected page. In cases of edit wars, there may be a template available that should be placed on the article. See, for example, Wikipedia:Template:Protected. Unprotect works in exactly the same way.

Editing a protected page
Click edit this page in the normal way. The only difference is the warning at the top of the page reminding you the page is protected. See protection and check whether your wiki has a protection policy before doing this.

Protecting or unprotecting an image
Protecting an image is mostly the same as protecting a page (see above). When you click "protect" on an image description page, both the page and the image are protected. The image description page will be protected, and non-sysops will not be able to revert the image to an earlier version, or upload a new version over it.

Editing the interface
Following consensus to do so, you can change the wording of the user interface by editing the protected pages in the MediaWiki namespace. You can change the design of the interface at MediaWiki:Monobook.css. These pages are only editable by admins.

Block a user or IP
For IPs, you can click the block link that appears next to the IP on recent changes. For logged in users, you must go to Special:Blockip. Fill in the name or IP of the user you want to block in the first field, and the length of the block in the second. This is usually "24 hours", but can also be specific days such as "next Thursday" or a date, as described in the tar manual. Add the reason for the block in the third field. This reason should explain to the user why they are blocked. Remember that other users may be innocently affected by the block and will see this message, so do not put anything offensive, confusing or vague as the reason. Then click the block this user button. This will be logged at Special:Log/block and the user will appear in the list of blocked IP addresses and usernames until the block expires. See Blocking and check whether your wiki has a policy on this.

Blocking a range of IPs
Go to Special:Blockip and enter the range in the first field. Then follow the instructions in the section above. Please do not block ranges if you do not understand the process. Read vandalbot for instructions.

Unblock a user, IP or range
Go to Special:Ipblocklist, find the user you want to unblock, and click the unblock link. You will have a confirmation page where you must fill in the reason for the unblock. This will be logged at Special:Log/block and the user will be immediately unblocked. If a range is blocked, you need to unblock the whole range. It isn't possible to unblock a specific IP from that range.

Using sysop revert
Any user can revert a page. Administrators have a rollback button to make this easier. To revert the edits of one user to the last version by the previous author, click rollback on the page history, the user contribution list, or on the diff page. Your revert will be marked as a minor edit and given the automatic edit summary Reverted edits by X to last version by Y. In cases of large scale vandalism that flood recent changes, you may use "bot rollback". 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=Vandal&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 Recentchanges display.

Related pages

 * Help:User access levels
 * Stewards' how-to guide
 * Administrators
 * Reading list for Wikipedia admins