Shortcut: WP:UAL

A contributor's level of access to Wikipedia is determined by their presence in various 'user groups'. Each group is associated with certain 'permissions', which permit the use of certain features of the MediaWiki software. Users are assigned the highest possible permissions based on the groups they are members of. A user who is an administrator, bureaucrat and rollbacker, for instance, would be able to use Special:Unwatchedpages (granted with the 'sysop' group), Special:RenameUser (granted with the 'bureaucrat' group) and to also use rollback (granted with the 'sysop' and 'rollbacker' groups). If the user was removed from the 'sysop' group, he would still be able to use rollback, because he is still a member of the 'rollbacker' group.

Membership in a user group is sometimes referred to as a "flag" or "bit"; being made a member of the 'sysop' group is synonymous with being "given the admin bit" or "receiving the admin flag"

All visitors to the site, including anonymous users, are part of the '*' group, while all logged-in users are also part of the 'user' group. Users are automatically promoted into the 'emailconfirmed' group when they confirm their e-mail address at Special:ConfirmEmail, and into the 'autoconfirmed' group when their account is at least four days old. Other flags are only given upon request; some, such as 'rollbacker' or 'bot', are granted unilaterally if the user demonstrates a need for them (see Wikipedia:Requests for rollback and Wikipedia:Bots/Requests for approval). Others, such as 'sysop' and 'bureaucrat', are given only after community discussion and consensus at Wikipedia:Requests for adminship. Users are only made members of groups such as 'oversight' and 'checkuser' with the approval of the Arbitration Committee and after confirming their identity with the Wikimedia Foundation.

User groups

Anonymous users

Contributors who have not created an account or logged in may read all Wikipedia pages (except restricted Special pages), and edit pages that are not protected or semi-protected. They may create talk pages in any talk namespace but may not create pages in even-numbered namespaces. They cannot upload files or images. They must answer a CAPTCHA if they wish to make an edit which involves the addition of one or more external links, and click a confirm link to purge pages. All users may query the site API in 500-record batches.

New users

In addition to the above, contributors who are logged in to an account may create pages in any namespace (except the MediaWiki namespace) and e-mail other users if they have specified an email address in their user preferences. All logged-in users may mark edits as minor. They may purge pages without a confirmation step, but are still required to answer a CAPTCHA when adding external links.

Autoconfirmed users

Accounts which are more than four days old are automatically promoted to the 'autoconfirmed' group. Autoconfirmed users may move pages, edit semi-protected pages, and upload files or upload a new version of an existing file. They are no longer required to enter a CAPTCHA under any circumstances. Autoconfirmed users may mark pages as patrolled in Special:NewPages.

Emailconfirmed users

Users who have confirmed an e-mail address in Special:Preferences can use any Email feature on the site.

Bots

See also: Wikipedia:Bot policy

Contributions from users assigned to the 'bot' user group are not displayed in recent changes or watchlists to users who have opted to hide bot edits. Minor edits made by bot accounts to user talk pages do not trigger the "you have new messages" banner. Bot accounts can query the API in batches of 5,000 rather than 500.

See Special:Listusers/bot for a list of users in this group.

Rollbackers

See also: Wikipedia:Rollback for non-admins

Users who are members of the 'rollbacker' user group may revert revisions using the rollback feature.

See Special:Listusers/rollbacker for a list of users in this group.

Ipblock-exempt

Users who are members of the 'ipblock-exempt' user group are not effected by autoblock.

See Special:Listusers/ipblock-exempt for a list of users in this group.

Accountcreator

Users who are members of the 'accountcreator' user group are not affected by the 6 account creation limit per day per IP.

See Special:Listusers/accountcreator for a list of users in this group.

Administrators

See also: Wikipedia:Administrators

Users who are members of the 'sysop' user group may block and unblock other users (including themselves); they are also immune from IP-address or CIDR-range blocks. They can delete and restore pages and view the history of a deleted page or a user's deleted contributions. They can protect and unprotect pages; and edit protected pages, pages in the MediaWiki namespace, and the .css or .js subpages of other users. They can also use Special:Userrights to add or remove users from the 'rollbacker' group, and view certain other special pages such as Special:UnwatchedPages.

See Special:Listusers/sysop for a list of users in this group.

Bureaucrats

See also: Wikipedia:Bureaucrat

Users who are members of the 'bureaucrat' user group have extended access to Special:UserRights. They are able to add users to the 'administrator' group, but not remove them, add users to the 'bureaucrat' group, but not remove them, and both add users to and remove users from the 'bot' user group. They may also use Special:MakeSysop and Special:MakeBot for the same purposes. They have access to Special:RenameUser, with which they can rename users (including themselves).

See Special:Listusers/bureaucrat for a list of users in this group.

Oversights

See also: Wikipedia:Oversight

Users who are members of the 'oversight' user group have access to Special:HideRevision, through which they can permanently hide revisions of pages from all users, and Special:Oversight, where they can view a log of such actions and the content of the hidden revisions.

See Special:Listusers/oversight for a list of users in this group.

CheckUsers

See also: Wikipedia:Checkuser and meta:CheckUser policy

Users who are members of the 'checkuser' have access to Special:CheckUser. They are able to view a list of all IP addresses used by a user account to edit the english wikipedia, a list of all edits made by an IP, or all user accounts that have used an IP address. They may also view a log of such requests.

See Special:Listusers/checkuser for a list of users in this group.

Stewards

See also: meta:Steward

Users who are members of the 'steward' user group may grant and revoke any permission to or from any user on any wiki operated by the Wikimedia Foundation. This group is set on MetaWiki, and may use meta:Special:Userrights to set permissions on any wikimedia wiki; they may add or remove any user from any group. Stewards generally act only when there is no user on a particular wiki that can make the necessary change. This includes granting of the 'administrator' or 'bureaucrat' access levels on wikis which do not have any local bureaucrats, and removing such flags if the user resigns or the account is acting maliciously. Stewards are also responsible for granting and revoking access levels such as 'oversight' and 'checkuser', as no other group is capable of making such changes.

Stewards can also act as checkusers or oversighters on wikis which do not have local members of those groups. If a wiki has a passing need for an edit to be oversighted, for instance, a steward can add themselves to the 'oversight' user group on that wiki, perform the necessary oversight activity using Special:HideRevision, and then remove themselves from the 'oversight' group using their steward rights.

All steward actions are logged at meta:Special:Log/rights. See meta:Special:Listusers/steward for a list of users in this group.

Developers

See also: meta:Developers

There are a number of development areas of some sort to which access is limited, which are not specific to any particular wiki. SVN commit access allows the development version of the MediaWiki software to be modified, toolserver access allows applications to be uploaded to and run on the toolserver, and a small number of people have shell access to the servers on which Wikipedia and the other projects of the Wikimedia Foundation are hosted.

Several of the Wikimedia developers with root access to the wikimedia servers are granted permissions without using the normal approval channels, as the rights they infer are merely safer or more efficient alternatives to modifying the database directly. For instance, Tim Starling, Brion Vibber, Kate and RobH have 'steward' rights although they were not elected.

The 'developer' user group exists on all Wikimedia projects, but it is not usually populated. If a developer needs access to a specific permission on wikipedia, they can assign the permission to the 'developer' group, then add themselves to the group using steward rights. Permissions which have been assigned to the 'developer' group include siteadmin, which enables them to rename users with more than 200,000 edits.

A (usually empty) list of users in the 'developer' group can be found at Special:Listusers/developer

Founder

The founder group was created on the English Wikipedia as a mark of respect for Jimmy Wales, founder of Wikipedia. He is also a steward and so has unrestricted access to Special:UserRights.

Table

• As a function of the Requests for adminship and Requests for Bureaucratship processes, all bureaucrats on the English Wikipedia are also administrators, and so have all the permissions of the 'sysop' user group in addition to those rights from the 'bureaucrat' group. However this is not a requirement of the MediaWiki software; it is technically possible for a user to be a bureaucrat without also being an admin.
• Deprecated permissions are either no longer assigned to any group, or the group to which they are assigned is no longer populated.

See also

• User permissions API
• User rights
• Meta:User classes
• Special:ListGroupRights
• See what usergroup a user is in

Others:

• Administrators
• Requests for adminship
• Bureaucrats
• Oversight permission
• Requests for checkuser
• CheckUser policy