Meta:Admin handbook
Meta is the hub for coordinating Wikimedia projects. It is important to recognize that Meta is not a content-oriented wiki and taking a content approach to administration on Meta does not work.
A handbook has been made for new admins, to prevent reinventing the wheel and shorten the learning curve, as most new administrators on Meta come from content projects.
Users
The average Wikimedian does not come to Meta in the course of their editing unless they have a specific task in mind, such as requesting a username change, requesting steward intervention, or to comment on a global issue.
New users that solely edit Meta are rare and may not understand the special purpose of this project and our inclusion policy.
Recognize however that while a user may have a low edit count here, they may be an established user on their home project.
Language
Appreciate that Meta is one of the few multilingual projects under the Wikimedia umbrella and, when communicating with editors who do not share a common language with you, you may have to simplify your language (so as to both help them read it if they have a basic understanding of your language, and help translation software if they want to use it), speak in their language, or involve another user that can translate or communicate for you.
User groups
User groups you may encounter on Meta can be categorized in three ways:
- Local (user, patroller, sysop, etc.)
- Global (global rollback, global renamer, global sysop, etc.)
- Special purpose (staff, sysadmin, etc.)
Meta combines the reviewer and rollback user groups into one: patroller. It requires an onwiki, community request to be filed at Meta:Requests for help from a sysop or bureaucrat.
Community discussion areas
Local discussion:
- Admin noticeboard: Meta:Requests for help from a sysop or bureaucrat
- Community noticeboard: Meta:Babel
- Global discussions: Wikimedia Forum
- Local requests for comment: Meta:Requests for comment
Global discussion:
There are also various other pages for more specified purposes, like Steward elections, consultations/proposals, strategy pages, and various other areas.
Blocks
Being that Meta's main use is by editors on content projects, most blocks on Meta are for long-term abusers, spammers/spambots or vandalism-only accounts. While Meta has user warning templates and user block templates, they are rarely used. Instead, denial of recognition and reverting, blocking and ignoring is usually practiced for obvious vandalism/spam.
When it comes to established users on other projects editing here, the main issue that can arise is civility. You can read Meta's civility policy.
Page protection
Be cautious when protecting pages. What are the implications of protecting a page? For example, would protecting a highly watched page after LTA vandalism really help? Or would it just send the LTA to abuse a less-watched part of the wiki? Does protecting the talk page of an active user really help? Or will they move to sending attack messages on a new user's talk page, and prevent good faith non-autoconfirmed editors from messaging them?
Try the honeypot approach; consider not protecting the page unless absolutely needed.
Long-term abuse
Be cautious when reverting long-term vandals and/or abusers since you likely are just encouraging them. Consider the block, revert and ignore principle. If you are not an administator, consider instead reporting them to the administrators' noticeboard or the stewards' global requests page and ignoring. If the LTA edit is harmless (i.e. adding a barnstar to a talk page) or helpful (i.e. correcting a typo), consider the denial of recognition approach.
Edit warring
Rollbacking an edit without the means to block a user is likely to start a revert war. Either do not revert at all, as it may encourage them, or only revert after you think they are long gone. With LTAs, reduce the typical three-revert rule (3RR) down to a one-revert rule; find an admin instead. Meta is not a content wiki, we are not going to lose readers as a result of a disruptive edit that remains in place for a bit.
Abusive usernames
Many LTAs use abusive usernames that later are hidden or suppressed. Please do not revert these edits using rollback, undo them instead removing their username from the edit summary. Please report abusive usernames that meet the suppression criteria to the local oversight team or the stewards in private.
Global impacts
Abuse Filters
Global AbuseFilter (Special:AbuseFilter) is enabled on most wikis, but excludes some big wikis such as enwiki. Administrators need to be extremely careful with activating and editing abuse filters as they can prevent actions on most Wikimedia projects.
Blacklists
- Spam blacklist - A list of website links that are not accepted by the software.
- Title blacklist - A list of page titles and usernames not allowed by the software. Local administrators are unaffected by this list.
- Global rename blacklist - A list of users who cannot request a global rename through Special:GlobalRenameRequest.
- Email blacklist - A list of emails that cannot be used for registering or sending emails.
MassMessage
Using MassMessage (Special:MassMessage), admins and MassMessage senders can both message local and global users.
Stewards
While stewards have access to the administrator toolset globally, they can use some of these permissions on Meta as part of the Meta–steward relationship policy. As such, Meta admins work closely alongside stewards. Stewards typically limit their use of the Meta admin toolset to routine or uncontroversial actions such as countervandalism, modifying the blacklists or for emergency actions.
It is important to note that Meta admins have no global authority. A Meta admin closing or reverting a steward request should not be done unless in extremely clear cases such as a disruptive request by a vandal.