Wikipedia:User groups

This is an information page. It is not an encyclopedic article, nor one of Wikipedia's policies or guidelines; rather, its purpose is to explain certain aspects of Wikipedia's norms, customs, technicalities, or practices. It may reflect differing levels of consensus and vetting.

Shortcuts WP:UG WP:UAL WP:RIGHTS

A user right is an action that a user can perform, such as editing or blocking. A user group is a named collection of user rights, such as extended confirmed, rollbacker, or administrator. For example, the administrator user group possesses multiple user rights, including block and protect. User groups are assigned to accounts via various processes (automatically, or by requesting at places such as WP:PERM or WP:RFA). User groups are important because user rights cannot be granted directly to accounts, so instead we grant user groups to accounts.

The raw lists of user groups and user rights are located at Special:ListGroupRights (specific to English Wikipedia) and meta:Special:GlobalGroupPermissions (for every Wikimedia wiki). Easy-to-read summaries of those pages with some additional explanation are provided below.

There are two types of access leveling: automatic (such as extended confirmed) and requested (such as rollbacker). User groups are determined by whether the Wikipedian is logged in, the account's age and edit count, and what manually assigned rights the account has.

Anyone can use the basic functionalities of Wikipedia even if they are not logged in. Unless they are blocked, they may freely edit most pages. Being logged in gives users many advantages, such as having their public IP address hidden and the ability to track one's own contributions. Furthermore, once user accounts are more than a certain number of days old and have made more than a certain number of edits, they automatically become autoconfirmed or extended confirmed, allowing the direct creation of articles, the ability to move pages, to edit semi-protected and extended-protected pages, and upload files. Further access levels need to be assigned manually by a user with the appropriate authority. An editor with more experience and in good standing can attempt to become an administrator, which provides a large number of advanced permissions. Many different flags for specialized tasks are also available.