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 guide to using your admin powers.

Please note that this page discusses only HOW to; it doesn't address WHEN or WHY you should use your admin tools, and why you should not use them in ways that are biased or unfair to the community. Each wiki develops their own policies so ensure you are familiar with the local guidelines before you perform any of these actions.

How do I delete a page?
Click the delete or delete this page link on the page you want to delete. You will be shown a page with a box to type in the reason for deletion, and a confirm box. The box will often contain the first 150 characters of the page. For speedy deletions, it may be acceptable to leave the full text as the reason. In other cases, you should specify why you are deleting it. An example reason is "listed on VfD for 5 days with 18 votes to delete and 1 to keep". This confirmation page will give you a warning if the page has more than one revision in its history.

If something looks like a candidate for speedy deletion but has a page history, you must check the history before deleting it. The revision you are looking at could be just a vandalised version of a real article. After you have deleted it, check if it has a talk page and delete this too. If the page is being deleted because it should not exist, check that nothing links to it to prevent it being created again. If the page was listed on a requests for deletion page, follow the relevant guidelines on your wiki, which may include archiving the deletion discussion.

See Help:Deletion for more details.

How do I delete an image?
To delete all versions of an image, you can select the "delete all revisions" option, or delete the image description page in the same way you would delete an article. To delete individual revision, click the del link next to that revision.

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.

Images can be undeleted, and thus you can delete any questionable images first, and ask questions later. The deleted images, along with their descriptions, can be restored from Special:Undelete at your Wikia wiki.

How do I undelete 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.wikia.com/index.php?title=Special:Undelete&target=Foo.

See also Viewing and restoring deleted pages by sysops.

How do I merge page histories?
Merging page histories is a means of fixing cut and paste moves in order to maintain a complete edit history. 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 can be reversed, but doing so may take a long time, especially when the page has a long history, so please do not attempt it unless you understand the procedure described at Wikipedia:How to fix cut and paste moves.

How do I protect or unprotect a page?
To protect a page, click the protect or protect this page link. It is a common mistake to protect pages unnecessarily. See Help:Page protection for full details.

Clicking the link will lead to a confirmation screen very similar to the one used for deletion. Select the level of protection, enter the reason for protection in the box, and press confirm. There is also an option for cascade protection, which fully protects all templates, page transclusions and images used on that page. This checkbox should generally be left unchecked. In cases of edit wars, there may be a template available that should be placed on the article. See, for example, Template:Protected. Unprotecting a page works in exactly the same way.

How do I protect or unprotect 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-admins will not be able to revert the image to an earlier version, or upload a new version over it.

How do I edit a protected page?
When looking at a protected page, users will see a "view source" link instead of "edit this page" - they can view and copy the wikitext, but not make changes. Admins will be able to click "edit this page" in the normal way. The only difference is the warning at the top of the page reminding the page is protected. See Help:Page protection and check whether your wiki has a protection policy before doing this.

How do I edit the wiki 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 by customizing the skins used on your wiki. These pages are only editable by admins.

How do I block a troublemaker?
For IPs and logged in users you can click the block link in recent changes, the block link in contributions, or go to Special:Blockip. Fill in the username (if needed) and length of the block -- choose from the list, or add a custom time. The feature recognizes most common time expressions (see the tar manual).

Add the reason for the block in the last 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, and the block reason will also show up publicly on Recent changes, so do not put anything offensive, confusing or vague as the reason. Do not display anger or insult problem users in the block reason, as it only motivates them to continue making trouble -- the best responses are professional and bland, as a bored vandal will soon move on to other things.

Select or deselect the additional block options, and 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. You cannot apply overlapping blocks, so in order to change a block that has not yet expired, the first block will have to be removed.

See Help:Blocking and check whether your wiki has a policy on this.

Blocking a range of IPs
Please do not block ranges of IP numbers if you do not understand the process -- it is very easy to block more users than you intend to.

Please read MediaWiki's range block help page for instructions. Ask a member of the Community Team if you need help.

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.

Block in more than one wiki
If a user is persistently vandalizing or spamming across more than one wiki, you may request a global block from a staff member or janitor.

How do I revert undesirable edits?
Any user can revert a page. Administrators and users with rollback rights have a rollback button to make this process quicker. 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. Since rollbacks skip the step of adding a custom edit summary, they should be used for obvious vandalism only. If you are reverting a good-faith edit, avoid the rollback and always use the traditional revert so you can explain your rationale in the summary.

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
 * Administrators
 * Reading list for Wikipedia admins
 * Stewards' how-to guide