Wikipedia:Core administrator rights

Block, protect, and delete are the core set of maintenance tools which should only be given to administrators.

It is often proposed that various rights and abilities that Wikipedia administrators have be unbundled from the administrator toolset and given to other editors. This has been proposed successfully on several occasions. However, there are three administrator rights which have never been successfully unbundled. These are the three core administrator rights:

• Blocking – the ability to prevent users, IP addresses, and IP address ranges from editing Wikipedia (either site-wide, or in part)
• Protection – the ability to restrict editing and moving on specific pages, the creation of specific pages, or the uploading of new versions of locally uploaded files
• Deletion – the ability to remove, restore, and view deleted pages, as well as revisions and logs

Currently, only administrators have the ability to perform these actions, and it is unlikely that the ability to perform these actions will ever be given to other users, as they are intimately related to each other and sit at the core of administrative work on Wikipedia.

Rationale

Wikipedia administrators are responsible for preventing and responding to disruptive editing through the use of these tools. In doing so, an administrator typically has to weigh between these three options to arrive at the most appropriate response. By giving a user one core right and not the other two, we bias the user towards applying the response they are technically able to perform over the most effective response, which the user might not have access to. This does not necessarily occur deliberately; it's an unavoidable and oftentimes unconscious consequence of not having all of the administrative responses available to you – see Wikipedia:Relist bias for a similar phenomenon which has been documented in the Wikipedia deletion process.

For example, page protection is unnecessary when a block of a single user/IP address would be sufficient. Giving a user the ability to protect pages but not block users would bias those users to apply page protection when blocking would have been the better solution. Conversely, page protection is sometimes the superior solution over blocking individual users, particularly in cases where a specific article is being edited by many users. A block is also sometimes unnecessary when an infringing article has already been deleted and the user warned. Giving a user the ability to block users but not protect or delete pages will bias the user to apply blocks when page protection or deletion would have sufficed.

Furthermore, lacking access to a core right can lead to uninformed decisions when applying another core right. For example, an informed decision of whether to block a user or delete a page often requires the ability to view deleted revisions, the unbundling of which the Wikimedia Foundation's legal team has strongly opposed.

Successfully unbundled rights

Over the years, we have seen some rights which were originally given exclusively to administrators unbundled and given to other editors. These include:

• rollback – the ability to revert edits quickly
• autopatrolled – a flag that automatically marks newly created articles by the user as "patrolled"
• file mover – the ability to move pages in the file namespace
• template editor – the ability to edit highly visible templates
• page mover – the ability to suppress the creation of redirects when moving pages
• edit filter helper – the ability to view private edit filters
• event coordinator – the ability to grant the "confirmed" flag to new user accounts

Except for edit filter helper, these rights may be granted by any single administrator to any editor on request at Wikipedia:Requests for permissions. Edit filter helper requires a 3-day vetting process at Wikipedia:Edit filter noticeboard.

See also

• Wikipedia:Perennial proposals#Hierarchical structures
• Wikipedia:Village pump (proposals)/Persistent proposals/Straw poll for view-deleted