WikiAir:Administrators

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Administrators or admins are editors who have access to a number of special features that help maintaining WikiAir. They are experienced members of the community and may (and will) help wherever a problem occurs. If you need any assistance you may contact any admin listed here.

Contents

Admin 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 the Main Page and other protected pages. You can suggest changes at Talk:Main Page. The Main Page used to receive a lot of vandalism; protecting it is an unfortunate compromise to keep our welcome mat free of random profanity.
  • Protect and unprotect pages, with different kinds of protection against editing by certain classes of users, and page moving.

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 is a matter of cleaning up junk edits on pages with no actual content, or removing material that has been pasted from another site, thereby causing copyright infringement.
  • 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.

See Special:Ipblocklist for currently blocked addresses and usernames.

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. 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).

Keeping vandalism out of recent changes

  • Administrators can exclude bulk 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, [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 massive 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 do not like, but is meant only for simple vandalism, particularly massive flood vandalism.

Design and wording of the interface

Administrators can:

  • change the text of the interface by editing the pages in the MediaWiki 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 CSS in the monobook stylesheet at MediaWiki:Monobook.css; 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;
  • view Special:Unwatchedpages to see pages which may be more vulnerable to vandalism;
  • view the history of deleted pages, and the deleted contribs of users; and
  • create accounts with names similar to those of existing accounts

Admin privileges

As WikiAir is still a small community and no viable poll system has been implemented yet, the admins reserve the right of the "last word" in many decisions (page deletions, mergers, blocks etc). They usually will hear the persons involved and invite any member of the community to post their opinion, on which their decision will be (at least partly) based. Admin decisions can be overturned by the founder.

How to become an admin?

First of all: Be an active member of the community!
Second: Get in touch with User:Wikiadmin.

Current Admins

Retrieved from "http://www.wikiair.com/wiki/WikiAir:Administrators"