Global sysops

The following page documents an official cross-project policy. This page has been developed and approved by the community and its compliance is mandatory for all users. It must not be modified without prior community approval.

For legal and security reasons, the Wikimedia Foundation has decided to require two-factor authentication for this role.

Global sysops are highly trusted users with a strong track record of cross-wiki contributions that have sysop and interface administrator privileges on most public wikis, for the purposes of antivandalism and routine maintenance. They are not users with sysop tools on all wikis and they have no extra editorial control over content or the local community.

By default, global sysops may use this global user group's permissions on wikis that meet one or both of the following criteria:

• fewer than ten administrators exist; or
• fewer than three administrators have made a logged action within the past two months.

Projects may opt-in or opt-out at their own discretion if they obtain local consensus. Simply inform any steward of the community's decision. A wiki set is used to specify a list of wikis where global sysops do not have access (list).

Most global sysops also have global rollback . Unlike the global sysop rights, global rollback is truly global.

Requests for global sysop rights should be placed on Steward requests/Global permissions. The request will be approved by a steward if there is a consensus for the user to become a global sysop after a period of discussion of no less than two weeks. The discussion is not a vote; comments must present specific points in favor of or against the user's approval.

Continued global sysop access depends on both activity and the continued support of the Wikimedia community.

Inactivity:

Global sysops will automatically lose their access if in six months they've not used the respective rights outside of wikis on which they have local rights.

Vote of confidence:

Any steward may remove a global sysop's rights at any time if they feel the tools have been misused, or if a request for comment has shown that a significant minority does not trust the global sysop. If this occurs and the global sysop wants the tools back, a vote of confidence shall occur, where the global sysop must retain the consensus of the community in order to return their access.

This is the list of permissions, with explanations, which global sysops have. The permissions are nearly identical to those of regular administrators ; however, these permissions apply to any Wikimedia Foundation project that has not opted out of the global sysops' access list. They are not capable of changing any local userrights either (unless they also have appropriate local permissions).

Global sysops must have user pages on every wiki they use their global sysop access on, which provide contact information or link to their primary user page (creation bot available currently). Generally a global user page on Meta will cover that requirement, and those users are asked to include a user language declaration ("Babel").

For urgent help from a global sysop, join the IRC channel #wikimedia-gs^connect and type !gs in the channel to get the attention of global sysops.

If a user cannot resolve a dispute by talking to the global sysop, they can place a complaint on Talk:Global sysops, or contact any steward .

Global sysops may contact each other via the private mailing list.

• Last updated: 2023-02-26  [edit]

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• Global sysops: global permission · global groups (toolforge) · member list · group changelog
• Special global permissions
• Previous proposals
• Local discussions