Familypedia:Administrators

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Administrators are Wikians who have "sysop rights". Current Genealogy policy is to appoint new admins when it is felt that the current number of admins is insufficient. Administrators are chosen from Genealogy contributors who are active and who have been around for a while and are generally known and trusted members of the community.

This page is currently undergoing genealogiification to remove links to Wikipedia and associate more links with this wiki.

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"This should be no big deal," as Jimbo Wales has said.

Administrators are not imbued with any special authority, and are equal to everybody else in terms of editorial responsibility. Some Wikians consider the terms "Sysop" and "Administrator" to be misnomers, as they just indicate Genealogy users who have had performance- and security-based restrictions on several features lifted because they seemed like trustworthy folks and asked nicely. However, it should be noted that administrators do not have any special power over other users other than applying decisions made by all users.

The community does look to administrators to perform essential housekeeping chores that require the extra access administrators are entrusted with. Among them are watching the Votes for deletion debates and carrying out the consensus of the community on keeping or deleting these articles, keeping an eye on new and changed articles to swiftly delete obvious vandalism, and meeting user requests for help that require administrative access. Since administrators are expected to be experienced members of the community, users seeking help will often turn to an administrator for advice and information.

See also: Administrators' how-to guide

List of administrators

Bureaucrats

• IFaqeer (January 17, 2005)
• Robin Patterson (Admin: July 14, 2006, Bureaucrat: September 17, 2006)
• WMWillis (Admin: September 18, 2006, Bureaucrat: July 12, 2007)
• Phlox (Admin: November 19, 2007, Bureaucrat: September 20, 2009)

Administrators

• Nhprman (July 14, 2006)
• Thurstan (July 14, 2006)
• Richard Arthur Norton (1958- ) (March 28, 2007)
• AMK152 (July 6, 2008)
• DeGraffJE (September 28, 2009)

So, what's the deal?

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

Protected pages

• Directly edit protected pages. For information and guidelines, see Genealogy:Editing protected pages.
• Protect and unprotect pages. Pages are only protected in certain rare circumstances—for information and guidelines, see Genealogy:Protection policy.

Deletion and undeletion

• Delete pages and their history. For information and guidelines, see Genealogy:deletion policy. To suggest a page to delete (after reading the policy and guidelines pages!), see Genealogy:Votes for deletion. 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 copyright.
• View and restore deleted pages and their history.
• Permanently delete images. This is a non-reversible change: once deleted, always deleted. For information and guidelines, see Genealogy:Image use policy. To suggest an image to delete (after reading the policy), see Genealogy:Images and media for deletion. To challenge a decision to delete an image, make sure that you still have a copy of the image (else there is no way to restore it), then leave a post at Forum:Administrators' noticeboard. Note that there is no particular reason that image deletion should not be reversible; this is simply the way the software works at present.

Reverting

• Revert 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 edit summary (Reverted edits by X (Talk); changed back to last version by Y) and marks it as a minor change. In a fairly recent change, admins can also rapidly revert changes when viewing a diff.

Hiding vandalism from recent changes

• Sysops 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. 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 (by using the marker originally added to keep massive bot edits from flooding recentchanges, 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 Recentchanges. 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.

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.

• See Genealogy:blocking policy for more information on when blocks are appropriate and when they are not. See Special:Ipblocklist for currently blocked addresses and usernames

Design and wording of the interface

• As of December 6, 2003, sysops can change the text of the interface by editing the pages in the MediaWiki namespace. This includes the text at the top of pages such as the "Special:Whatlinkshere" and the page that a blocked user will see when they try to edit a page (MediaWiki:Blockedtext).

• As of June 3, 2004, sysops can edit the style of the interface by changing the CSS in the monobook stylesheet at MediaWiki:Monobook.css.

Responsibilities

Administrators should keep an eye on the following pages to help keep the wiki "cleaned up" and running the way it should. Administrators are expected to play an active role in helping out on one or more of these pages. If you are an administrator, please sign up below for an area you will help keep an eye on. If all of us work together it will not take much effort.

Unused images

Put 'em to use or get 'em out.  :)

New pages

Watch for compliance with WP:MOS.

Recent changes

Watch for vandalism; ban appropriately.

1. ~ Phlox 22:40, 27 November 2007 (UTC)

Genealogy:Copyright problems

Address the concerns here and modify the articles so they will not violate copyrights.

Becoming an administrator

If you would like sysop access, and you are willing to take on a little more responsibility in the Genealogy community, add your name to Genealogy:Requests for adminship according to the guidelines mentioned there, and a voting will take place by fellow editors in order to determine if you should become an administrator. A decision will be made in not less than two weeks after nomination.

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, and the ability to block IP addresses. You can learn about your newfound powers at the Wikipedia:Wikipedia:Administrators' how-to guide. You should also take a look at the pages linked from the Administrators' reading list before using any of your sysop abilities.

Other access types

In addition to administrators, there are other types of identified users, listed here in roughly ascending order of power. (Administrators, clearly, go after signed-in users.)

Signed-in users

Users with ordinary access, including visitors who haven't "signed in," can still do most things, including the most important: editing articles and helping with Genealogy maintenance tasks.

But only signed-up users can upload files or rename pages; see Special:Userlogin to sign up for yourself.

Bureaucrats

Users with "bureaucrat" status can turn other users into sysops (but not remove sysop status). Bureaucrats are created by other bureaucrats on projects where these exist, or by Wikia staff on those who don't yet have one. Sysoppings are recorded in Special:Log/rights.

Janitor

Janitors are basically Wikia-wide sysops (but with a name that will not confuse them with local sysops).

See Wikia:Janitors for more info, or Special:Listusers/janitor for a list.

Staff

Some Wikia staff members have full access to all wikis. They will be shown in Special:Listusers/staff on any wiki. Please see contact us for details on how to contact Wikia staff.

Technical Team

The Wikia technical team can make direct changes to the Wikia software and database. These people, by and large, do not carry out administrative functions. They can be contacted via technical@wikia.com.

Administrator abuse

If you think an administrator has acted improperly against you or another editor, you should express your concerns directly to the administrator responsible. Try to come to a resolution in an orderly and civil manner. However, if the matter is not resolved between the two parties, please post on Forum:Administrators' noticeboard.

Administrators can be removed if they continually misuse their powers.