System administrators

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 the Developers page on MediaWiki.org. For the editing access known as "administratorship" or "sysop" see administrator.

Wikimedia system administrators perform systems administration work on the Wikimedia servers. Their primary task is to ensure that the Foundation's collection of ~850 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, the Foundation's CTO has overall authority on all technical matters. On a day-to-day basis, various system administrators with root or shell access manage the server cluster.

System administrator actions

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 with no need of the steward flag, all system administrators who want to are members of the 'sysadmin' global group (automatic members lists). 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 system administrators have permissions on certain wikis as a result of due process on that wiki, for instance Tim Starling's adminship on English Wikipedia; such rights should not be removed in this fashion.

List

Do not contact random people on this list if you want something done. Instead, go to the #wikimedia-tech^connect irc channel. Please note, the list below doesn't contain all people with shell access on production. Basically all Wikimedia Foundation operation engineers have shell access.

System administrators

Name	Wikimedia account	IRC nick	SVN	Shell	Root	Bugzilla admin
root
Mark Bergsma	Mark Bergsma	mark	•	•	•
Tomasz Finc	Tfinc	tomaszf	•	•	•	•
Jens Frank	JeLuF	JeLuF	•	•	•
Ariel Glenn	ArielGlenn	atglenn or apergos	•	•	•	•
Rob Halsell	RobH	RobH	•	•	•	•
Domas Mituzas	Midom	domas	•	•	•
Peter Youngmeister		notpeter	•	•	•
Tim Starling	Tim Starling	TimStarling	•	•	•	•
River Tarnell	Kate	flyingparchment	•	•	•	•
Roan Kattouw	Catrope	RoanKattouw	•	•	•	•
Daniel Zahn	Mutante	mutante		•	•	•
shell
Name	Wikimedia account	IRC nick	SVN	Shell	Root	Bugzilla admin
Aaron Schulz	Aaron Schulz	AaronSchulz	•	•
Andrew Garrett	Werdna	werdn(um/a/us)	•	•		•
Erik Möller	Eloquence	Eloquence/Xirzon	•	•
Robert Stojnic	Rainman	rainman-sr	•	•
Erik Zachte	Erik Zachte	Erik_Zachte	•	•
Trevor Parscal	Trevor Parscal	TrevorParscal	•	•
Nimish Gautam	Nimish Gautam	nimish_g	•	•
Chad Horohoe	^demon	^demon	•	•		•
Antoine Musso	hashar	hashar	•	•		•
Sam Reed	Reedy	reedy	•	•		•
Niklas Laxström	Nikerabbit	Nikerabbit	•	•
Rob Lanphier	RobLa	robla	•	•		•

History

Initially, it was Jimmy Wales who installed software, ran update programs etc. on the servers. In March 2002, he proposed to give login accounts to some of developers ("Trusted user access to machine", Wikitech-l).

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.

See also

• System administrators: global permission • global groups (toolserver) • member list • group changelog
• Special global permissions