MEpedia:Admin guide

From MEpedia, a crowd-sourced encyclopedia of ME and CFS science and history
Revision as of 02:49, September 28, 2019 by Pyrrhus (talk | contribs) (→‎Protecting pages: c/e)

This Admin guide is intended to provide new administrators with the tools and information they need to be successful admins. For more information on admins, see: MEpedia:Administrators.

Monitoring

An administrator may regularly patrol changes to MEpedia. When there are multiple administrators, an administrator can mark a change as “patrolled”, which simply means that an administrator has already reviewed the change, so that other administrators don’t have to review the change as well. The typical pages monitored by administrators include the following:

For more information on “patrolling” changes, see MediaWiki's 'patrolled' edits.

Moderating discussion pages

Occasionally, an administrator may need to moderate a discussion on a talk page if the discussion gets out of hand. With the StructuredDiscussions extension, posts on discussion pages can be ‘deleted’ by administrators. (Posts can also be ‘hidden’ by regular users.)

Spam, vandalism, and hacking

An administrator is the first line of defense against spam, vandalism, and hacking. Developers can also provide assistance.

More extensive information on spam, vandalism, and hacking:

Protecting pages

Certain key pages may need to be protected from incorrect edits. Administrators can designate these key pages as 'protected', which prohibits non-administrators from editing them. Administrators can also designate a page as 'semi-protected', which prohibits new editors or moderated users from editing them. (A new editor is someone who has done fewer than 50 edits.)

Note: All pages in the "MediaWiki:" namespace are automatically protected by default.

User maintenance (‘Bureaucrat role’)

The ‘bureaucrat role’ of administrators is concerned with maintaining the users, groups, and rights of MEpedia. Users are members of groups, and each group has special rights. Therefore, you can change a user's rights by adding or removing them from certain groups.

For more information on the bureaucrat role, see MEpedia:Bureaucrats.

User notices

An administrator may periodically update the user notices:

Note: Every time you update MediaWiki:Sitenotice, you MUST also increase the number stored in MediaWiki:Sitenotice_id. If you do not increase the number in MediaWiki:Sitenotice_id, then the notice will NOT be shown to users.

Search-and-replace text

An administrator can search for text in multiple pages and automatically replace that text with other text. This tool comes in handy for tasks such as renaming categories in multiple pages.

Developer info

An administrator may occasionally need to work with developers. Developers are individuals who perform technical maintenance on the software and hardware underlying MEpedia.

See also

Learn more