Wikipedia:User groups
This is an information page. It is not a Wikipedia policy or guideline; rather, its purpose is to explain certain aspects of Wikipedia's norms, customs, technicalities, or practices. It may reflect varying levels of consensus. |
User groups are groups that an editor can apply for in order to receive advanced tools to help them with editing the encyclopedia. There are also some default user groups for logged-out editors and logged-in editors. Additionally, after making some edits, logged-in editors will be automatically assigned to certain user groups.
On the technical side, user groups are a collection of user rights which are assigned to various editors. Examples of user groups include extended confirmed, rollbacker, and administrator. User rights are actions an editor can perform, such as block, protect, edit, and rollback. User rights are assigned to user groups, and user groups are assigned to editors. A user group can have multiple user rights, and an editor can be in multiple user groups.
A specific editor's user groups can be checked at Special:UserRights. The complete list of English Wikipedia user groups and their user rights is at Special:ListGroupRights and is also summarized on this page. The complete list of global user groups (user groups that assign user rights on all 1,000 Wikimedia wikis) is at meta:Special:GlobalGroupPermissions.
Unregistered users
Users who are not logged in are identified by a temporary account identifier (or previously by their IP address) rather than a username, whether or not they have already registered an account. They may read all Wikipedia pages (except restricted special pages), and edit pages that are not protected to restrict editing.[1] They may create