System administrators

From Meta, a Wikimedia project coordination wiki

This page covers the people who manage and maintain the Wikimedia Foundation servers. Historically, these people were known as "developers," now an inaccurate term. For information on developers of the MediaWiki software, see developers or the Developers page on MediaWiki.org. For the editing access known as "administratorship" (or "sysop") see Meta:Administrators.

Wikimedia system administrators perform systems administration work on the Wikimedia servers. Their primary task is to ensure that the Foundation's collection of 800 wikis continue to function smoothly, so that users can continue to edit and view pages. As well as maintaining the hardware and software in the Wikimedia server cluster, they are responsible for updating and configuring the version of the MediaWiki software that runs on the Wikimedia servers, and can perform administrative tasks requiring direct server or database access, such as opening or closing new wikis, changing configuration settings, or (in emergencies) making edits directly into the database tables.

The Wikimedia Foundation legally controls the servers, so the Wikimedia Board of Trustees are ultimately responsible for determining who has sysadmin access, and how that responsibility is exercised. In general, Brion Vibber, the Foundation's CTO, has overall authority on all technical matters. On a day-to-day basis, various developers with root or shell access manage the server cluster.

Although system administrators are often not active on Wikimedia wikis themselves, they may occasionally need to perform actions for technical reasons, such as blocking users or bots that are consuming unacceptable amounts of system resources, or undoing edits that put heavy strain on the servers. Such actions should not be undone without consulting the system administrator.

To facilitate these changes being made in a transparent fashion, all system administrators are a member of the 'sysadmin' global group. This group allows them to set user rights for any user on any wiki, in the same fashion as stewards. So if a system administrator needs to perform an action restricted to administrators (like editing system messages) on a particular wiki, they can simply grant themselves admin status on that wiki to make the action. In addition, the 'sysadmin' group has access to Special:GlobalGroupPermissions, where system administrators can change the permissions assigned to their global group. So as an alternative, the system administrator could add editinterface to the global group permissions, and would then be able to edit system messages on all wikis.

System administrators are encouraged to use the latter method of granting permissions, to avoid the lists of administrators/bureaucrats on local wikis becoming cluttered with users who are not 'genuine' members of those groups. These self-promotions may be removed at any time by stewards, as they can be easily restored if needed. However, some developers have permissions on certain wikis as a result of due process on that wiki, for instance Tim Starling's adminship on en.wiki; such rights should not be removed in this fashion.

[edit] History

System administrators formerly had an important role in the Wikipedia power structure, since they were the only ones able to promote and demote sysops, and lock user accounts (before the "block" feature of MediaWiki existed).

Some sysadmins had shell access to the California servers, but due to inactivity, weren't given shell access on the "new" Florida servers. Magnus Manske, April King, Lee Daniel Crocker, Axel Boldt, Matthias Jordan, Neil Harris and Ed Poor are all in this category.

[edit] List

Do not contact random people on this list if you want something done. Instead, go to the #wikimedia-tech channel on irc.freenode.net.

System administrators

Name	IRC nick	SVN	Shell	Root	MediaZilla admin
root
Mark Bergsma	mark	•	•	•
Tomasz Finc	tomaszf	•	•	•	•
Jens Frank	JeLuF	•	•	•
Ariel Glenn	atglenn or apergos	•	•	•
Rob Halsell	RobH	•	•	•	•
Domas Mituzas	domas	•	•	•
Tim Starling	TimStarling	•	•	•	•
River Tarnell	flyingparchment	•	•	•	•
Fred Vassard	aZaFred	•	•	•	•
Brion Vibber	brion	•	•	•	•
shell
Name	IRC nick	SVN	Shell	Root	MediaZilla admin
Aaron Schulz	AaronSchulz	•	•
Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason	avar	•	•
Andrew Garrett	werdn(um/a/us)	•	•
Erik Möller	Eloquence/Xirzon	•	•
Robert Stojnic	rainman-sr	•	•
Erik Zachte	Erik_Zachte		•

[edit] See also

• ja:Wikipedia:開発者

User groups
Local:	blocked user – anonymous user – registered user – bot – administrator – bureaucrat – oversight – checkuser
Global:	Abuse filter editors – locked account – unified account – bots – rollback – ombudsmen – sysop – system administrators – staff – steward – founder