Ballotpedia:Administrators

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Administrators, commonly known as admins and also called sysops (system operators), are Ballotpedia editors who have access to technical features that help with maintenance. They can protect and delete pages, block other editors, and undo these actions as well. Administrators undertake additional responsibilities on a voluntary basis.

The maintenance and administration of Ballotpedia can be conducted by anyone, even without the specific technical functions granted to administrators.

Administrators are experienced members of the community, and users seeking help are invited to turn to administrators for advice and information.

A list of administrators can be found at Special:Listusers/sysop.

Administrator tools

Deletion and undeletion

• Delete pages, including images, and their history. For information and guidelines, see Ballotpedia:Deletion policy. To suggest a page for deletion (after reading the policy and guidelines pages), see Ballotpedia:Nominations for deletion or add it to the category, Category:Articles nominated for deletion. Sometimes deletion is a technical matter, in which a redirection page has to be removed to make way for renaming an article, or a page whose history has been broken up has to be deleted and the pieces recombined. Other times it is a matter of cleaning up junk edits on pages with no actual content, or removing material that has been pasted from another site, thereby causing copyright infringement.

• View and restore deleted pages, including images, and their history.

Block and unblock

• Block IP addresses, IP ranges, and user accounts, for a specific time or indefinitely.

• Unblock IP addresses, IP ranges, and user accounts.

• See Ballotpedia:Blocking policy for more information on when blocks are appropriate and when they are not. See Special:Ipblocklist for currently blocked addresses and usernames.

Reverting

• Revert pages quickly. Any user (logged-in or not) can revert a page to an earlier version. Administrators have a faster, automated reversion tool to help them revert vandalism. When looking at a user's contributions, a link that looks like: [rollback] – appears next to edits that are at the top of the edit history. Clicking on the link reverts to the last edit not authored by that user, with an edit summary of (Reverted edits by X (talk) to last version by Y) and marks it as a minor change. One-click rollback is mainly intended for vandalism, spam, etc. An explanation is warranted when disputing content, either in the edit summary or by reference to discussion on the talk page; omitting such explanation (whether through rollback or by leaving the summary field blank) is counter-productive and potentially antagonistic.

Vandalism

• Administrators can exclude bulk vandalism from Recent changes. To do this, add &bot=1 to the end of the URL used to access a user's contributions. For example, [http://www.ballotpedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:Contributions&target=Example&bot=1]. When the rollback links on the contributions list are clicked, the revert and the original edit that you are reverting will both be hidden from the default recent changes display.