RationalWiki:Sysop guide
So you just discovered that you have extra buttons. Someone must have promoted you out of respect or in jest.
Commiserations, you are now a RationalWiki Janitor Sysop!
Contents |
[edit] What's a "sysop"?
Sysops ("system operators" or "administrators") are the gods of most wikis. To be made a Sysop is a boastable offense on other wikis (to show how awesome other wikis think you are), but on RationalWiki pretty much anyone who isn't an obvious vandal is made a Sysop within days—or even hours—of signing up. Sysops with a mighty click can cast down empires, shatter user accounts, and create an impenetrable wall between random trolls and the evil non-Euclidean vandals who lurk beyond our recent changes page. As such, give thanks to us yourself, or ye shall surely be lost.
There are at present 500 sysops on RationalWiki.
[edit] What looks different
There are six things you will see now that are different.
[edit] Patrolling
One which we pretty much ignore, but might freak you out at first, is the little red exclamation points (!) all over your "watchlist" and "recent changes", and the phrases "patrolled" and "mark as patrolled" turning up here and there. The exclamation points mark edits made by non-sysops and IPs which have not yet been vetted, or "patrolled" in wikispeak. This allows sysops to check these edits and confirm that they aren't wandalism or incompetent. Edits by sysops, friendly robots, and pies are automatically marked "patrolled".
To patrol an edit, click the word 'diff' where it says "(diff | hist)" and click "Mark as patrolled" - CTRL + F will help you to find this - if it is a sane edit. To mark a new page as patrolled, simply view the page, and a link will be displayed at the bottom-right to mark it as patrolled, once again, if it appears halfway coherent and sane, within our definitions of "sane".
If you come across a change that is obviously wrong or plain vandalism, check if this is fixed later in the history. If that is the case, you can mark the bad change as patrolled to avoid cluttering up the patrol list with edits that are fixed.
[edit] Page deletion
You will see a downward-pointing arrow among the tabs across the top of most pages, between "Fossil record" and "Search", just after the star: click the arrow and a menu appears containing the options "Vaporize," "Relocate," and "Protect." The "Vaporize" option allows deletion of unwanted pages - useless redirects left behind after pagemoves, for instance. Talk pages should be left in place, unless they are simply mistitled redirects.
With the exception of obvious spam or vandalism, articles or files should not be deleted without first discussing and finding agreement with other editors. For guidelines on page deletion, see the relevant section of the Community Standards.
If you delete a page that is pointed to by other pages it will create a "wanted page" upon deletion. It is best to click on "what links here" before deleting, to see if there are links to the page. Edit those pages to reflect that this page no longer exists. In other words, remove the [[ and the ]] from the pages that are pointing to the ex-page, or change the links to go to the new page name, if it was moved.
If you find one of those snarky "pretend" links, that conflates a word or phrase with the actual link target, putting "nowiki" tags around it will preserve the original joker's intent. This only applies to talk pages.
[edit] Blocking (how)
Most importantly, you will have the opportunity to block vandals for long enough to at least clean up their mess or slow them down by dumping them in the vandal bin.
In most cases it is not even necessary to block vandals. When you look at the contributions page for an editor, you will see a button that says "vandal bin" at the top of the page, below the title. The "vandal bin" limits edits to two per hour, and works very well to make them get bored and go away, while allowing them to come back and edit to ask if they can be paroled. When you click on "vandal bin" you will see any past activity in this area involving the editor.
To block a user, simply click the "block user" on the left hand menu or simply the "block" option that appears next to a user's name on recent changes. The "block time" box in the blocking screen accepts plain English descriptions of time - like "3 hours 1 minute 4 seconds", or you can select from the drop down list. The same is true for the reason for the block - you can write your own, or just pick from the menu.
When in the blocking window, you will also see the block history of the person you are blocking, which is quite helpful in deciding what time is appropriate.
Please don't block for long periods of time. Infinite blocks or blocks for periods of years are not necessary. In fact, it is highly unlikely that a block for more than a few days will ever be needed. Also, try to remember to uncheck the "block IP address" box, it is often pointless to block IP addresses as well.
Primarily, blocks are issued from one sysop to another for mundane or joke reasons.
[edit] Protection
Another tab you will see is used to restrict editing of a page. In most cases, it will say "Protect", since very few pages here are protected. In the case of a protected page, it will say "Change protection". We generally find it unnecessary to do this. However, from time to time a hot vandal target may be locked so only registered users can edit it.
It is also possible to protect a page title from being created as an article, or protect a page which has been deleted to prevent it from being created again. This can be useful when a vandal is repeatedly creating the same page.
[edit] Hiding revisions
We have the ability to "hide" individual revisions from public view without having to delete the entire page history. It is only used whenever someone posts personal information (e.g. street address, phone number, real name, place of work, etc.) without the subject's permission. These changes to revisions are logged in the deletion log.
When you look at a page's edit history, next to each revision you will see a checkbox, and in the header and footer you will see a button labeled "Show/hide selected revisions". You will also see a (show/hide) button in various places, for example when viewing diffs. Clicking these buttons brings you to a screen containing a list of options for hiding the revision(s) from public view:
- Hide revision text — Checking this hides whatever changes were made.
- Hide edit comment — Obviously, checking this hides whatever the edit summary was. Only use this if the edit summary also contains inappropriate information.
- Hide editor's username/IP — Checking this hides the username or IP address of the person who made the edit. This is usually not necessary, and will hide the edit from the user's contributions page.
Also make sure to say why you are hiding the revision in the "Log comment" box, such as "Removing post containing personal information (i.e. phone number, address, real name, etc.)".
If the revision needs to be hidden from other sysops, e.g. because it contains personal information, please contact a moderator.
If you must practice using this ability, practice only on your own userpage, or a sandbox in your userspace.
[edit] User rights management
Sysops have the ability to manage some user rights. You can add and remove the sysop and autopatrolled groups. For advice on how to decide whom to make sysops, you can see the now-deprecated bureaucrat guide; or, you can observe how others seem to be making the decision. Per the community standards, don't remove established sysops' rights unless there is an emergency - if you think a sysop has abused their powers and should be stripped of their sysopship, in the past such questions have been taken up at the chicken coop page.
Adding "autopatrolled" gives simply removes the exclamation marks non-sysops ordinarily would leave on Recent Changes. There are no official guidelines on its usage, but it has become a sort of trust tier between general editor and sysop. Generally, if a user has sufficiently established themselves as trustworthy enough to not require constant monitoring, they are added to this group. Autopatrolled does not add any attributes or abilities not granted by the sysop usergroup, so it's essentially redundant to add both groups.
[edit] The role of sysops
- A sysop is not a censor. The task of filtering out inappropriate or irrelevant article content is the responsibility of every editor. RationalWiki does not censor opinions, and specifically not on discussion pages. That said, the Wiki generally tries to avoid being a platform for extreme propaganda.
- A sysop is not a better kind of user. Access to certain functions of the wiki interface does not make any user better than others. A sysop is just a regular volunteer who must spend more time monitoring vandalism. As a rule however, users with a proven track record of consistent positive contributions to RationalWiki would usually be considered for the position.
- Nevertheless sysops are not the only notable users. Valuable membership is not a question of status but of the ability to collaborate with others to further RationalWiki's mission.
- Sysops are not governors. While sysops have access to functions like protection and blocking to help remove crazy wandalism, and other malicious stuff, sysops are not the regulators to break up fighting users. Mature conflict resolution is the responsibility of all editors, and sysops should not necessarily be the ones expected to step in and deal with editors with an attitude. However, they may need to make occasional judicious use of their blocking powerz to temporarily slow down abusive or offensive users and, perhaps, trolls.
- On RationalWiki, things are a bit "different" than on most wikis. As an editor once said, "where other wikis have editors, we have sysops. Where they have sysops, we have bureaucrats" (or, as it is now, moderators, though this is admittedly an imperfect comparison). What does this mean? On RationalWiki, we trust everyone except vandals to not only edit, but to help keep the floor clean. Yup, we meant it when we said "janitor".
[edit] More about blocking
[edit] Blocking and cleaning vandalism procedure
Verify that vandalism is taking place. This is frequently quite easy as you will see a series of "Blanked the page" messages on Recent Changes. In other cases you may have to look at the fossil record and compare pages.
When you are certain it is vandalism then use the Special:VandalBrake page to put the user in the vandal bin. This will severely limit their ability do do more damage (it only allows them one edit every 30 minutes). You could also block the vandal for a short period. The easiest way to do this is to click on "contribs", and then look up a bit - you'll see a bunch of links below the title, with one that says "vandal bin". Click on it and you'll be taken to a page that allows you to move the user to the vandal bin, along with any history with the bin they already have. If they really pissed you off and you feel the need to block them for more than a few hours, please enter "I was angry, please unblock tomorrow" or some such in the "block reason" box, so someone else can dissipate your anger after you go to bed.
Anyway! After playing with all those buttons, click on the user's "contribs" which follow their name on recent changes. This will bring up a list of their recent actions along with a "rollback" option. If the entries are obviously vandalism then open the rollback in tabs in your browser - this will return the article to its state prior to their edit(s). If it is not clear that it is vandalism, then first review the posts using "compare pages". (This is the "janitorial" aspect of the job, and matters more than playing with the "block user" button - mostly these days we save that for friends!)
[edit] Blocking options
If you are blocking an anonymous user, you will see these two check boxes:
- Block anonymous users only
- Prevent account creation
If you check the first box, Block anonymous users only, logged in users will not be affected by the block. You can use this option to force yourself to log in.
For registered users you will see this one instead of Block anonymous users only:
- Automatically block the last IP address used by this user, and any subsequent IPs they try to edit from
This option in conjunction with Prevent account creation will prevent the vandal from logging out and creating a new user account to bypass the block. Note that Prevent account creation alone is not enough - the blocked user can create a new account by logging out first.
When giving out a friendly block, please uncheck Automatically block the last IP address used by this user, and any subsequent IPs they try to edit from.
[edit] How not to block
Please don't block in anger or spite. Please do not block just because you disagree with someone. And please keep block lengths as short as it takes to do the job (minutes).
If possible, try engaging the vandal, not blocking them. Obviously someone editing random pages to insert gibberish or blank them is not going to respond to kindness, but if an editor seems to be trying to say something, see if you can get them to go to the talk pages. If they make nasty articles, we can de-nasty them in most cases.
Also, unlike certain other wikis that will remain anonymous, we do not block merely for associating with sites we disagree with. So if a well-known fascist user from you-know-where or a similar site joins, so long as they don't vandalize the pages, you shouldn't stop them; encourage them, rather.
[edit] Pledge template
If you want to, you can add {{Sysop pledge}} to your user or talk pages, to include this:
