Stewards

Template:StewardLang

Request permissions on a Wikimedia project: requests for permissions or requests for bot status
Contact Wikimedia Stewards on IRC: #wikimedia-stewards (web-based version)
If you are in urgent need of assistance, and only in that situation,
enter the command !steward in this channel to ask for help

Stewards can give and remove arbitrary user access levels, including sysop, bureaucrat, steward, checkuser, and bot, on any Wikimedia wiki. An additional level, oversight, is available at en.wikipedia.

List of stewards and the languages they speak

In alphabetical order

Active stewards

Last updated: 6 November 2006

	Name	IRC Nick	Spoken languages	Active from
1	Angela	Angela	(en)	20 April 2004
2	Anthere	Anthere	(fr, en)	20 April 2004
3	Daniel Mayer (mav)	mav, maveric149	(en, es)	20 April 2004
4	Danny	dannyisme	(en, he, yi)	31 May 2005
5	Datrio	Datrio	(pl, en, de, ...)	1 June 2005
6	Fantasy	Fantasy	(en, de, it, fr, es)	20 April 2004
7	Jon Harald Søby	Jhs	(no, nn, en, da, sv, de, es, eo)	11 January 2006
8	Oscar	oscar	(nl and its closely related languages, en, de, fr, es, it, sv, and a bit of turkish and spoken hong-kong chinese)	31 May 2005
9	Paginazero	Paginazero	(it, en, ru, de, fr, es)	11 January 2006
10	Dan Smith	rdsmith4	(en, es)	11 January 2006
11	Shizhao	Shizhao	(zh, en-1, ru-1)	31 May 2005
12	Sj	Sj	(en, de, es)	31 May 2005
13	Snowdog	Snowdog	(it, en, fr, es, ca, pt)	31 May 2005
14	Suisui	Suisui	(ja, en)	11 January 2006
15	Walter	WalterBE	(nl, en)	11 January 2006
16	Yann	yannf	(fr, en, gu, hi)	31 May 2005

Inactive stewards

A user was considered inactive if he/she didn't use the stewards tool for two months
Last updated: 6 November 2006

	Username	Spoken languages	Active from	Last edit	Last time used steward tools	Notes
1	Ascánder	(es, en, fr)	11 January 2006	21 July 2006	23 June 2006	Resigned on nov 22th (lack of time to continue).
2	Ausir	(pl, en, de, ru)	11 January 2006	11 August 2006	18 May 2006
3	Jimbo Wales	(en)	6 February 2006	5 November 2006	12 February 2006
4	Romihaitza	(ro, en, fr, it-2, es-1)	11 January 2006	1 September 2006	22 July 2006

Policy for requesting stewardship

Stewards elections are usually done once a year, when the needs for new stewards becomes necessary.

The voting will start on the 25th November 2006 and it will end on the 15th December 2006. You can list yourself during the voting time, but you'll have lower chances to reach sufficient support then (so try to candidate before the starting date). Because stewardship may require actions with legal consequences, only those individuals who have attained the age of 18 years are eligible to stand for election. You must identify yourself personally to the Wikimedia Foundation office (bpatrick_at_wikimedia.org) and supply proof of your age and real-life identity. The grant of administrative powers through stewardship is not to be taken lightly. NB: These requirements are the same as those required of persons running for the Board of Trustees.

To get through the elections, if you wish to become a new steward you must:

Gain at least 30 votes in favor
At least 80% overall votes in favor
Have an account on Meta with a linked account on another project
Be active for at least 3 months on that project
Preferably show you are active on meta as well (link to your contributions on meta for example, or mention you are already sysop here, short statement regarding your background on Wikimedia, current activity and anything else you want.

The Board generally choose an ultimate number of people who'll gain new steward status.

Please remember to follow the Steward policies. Also be aware of the fact that inactive stewards will have their steward flag taken away. Voters: Anyone can vote provided that he/she has a valid account on meta with a link to at least one user page, on a project where the editor is a participant, with at least 3 months participation (not just to his/her userpage but) to the project.

Policy for de-stewardship

Inactivity
Any steward inactive (as a steward) on meta for a full year will be de-sysoped. "Inactive" means no steward action in the past 6 months and less than 10 stewards action in the last year. They may re-apply through the regular way.

Poll after a year
Stewardship is not a lifetime status. Get it if you need it. Keep it if people trust you. Quit it if you do not need it. Lose it if people feel they cannot trust you. Steward status will be granted till next elections (an incentive to make elections only once per year...). After that time, people will be invited to comment and in particular to ask for removal of your status.
However, since steward is typically a position likely to get into trouble and since the steward group can easily control itself, the confirmation itself will be done by all stewards (no self-approval). If the majority of other stewards request destewarding, the steward will lose his status. Stewards will be specifically careful to review situations when opposition from the community is registered.

Page for confirmation/removal: Stewards/confirm

Instructions to stewards for adjusting user rights

Check the Requests for permissions page regularly
Check that the procedure on that page has been followed
Check that the request does not violate any policies (eg - you can't request adminship here if your wiki has a local bureaucrat)
Carry out the request using Special:Makesysop (see below for detailed instructions)
Move the request to the Archive with a comment that the request is fulfilled
Tell the person (preferably on their own wiki) that they are now an admin and/or bureaucrat

Using the steward version of Special:Makesysop

To adjust user rights on any Wikimedia project, go to Special:Makesysop on Meta.

Attention: "User rights management", in the "Restricted special pages" section, is the wrong page; you need "Make a user into a sysop".

The steward version of Special:Makesysop is slightly different from the bureaucrat version. You need to enter three things: the user name, the wiki, and the rights.

Enter a username:
Enter the user name (which must begin with a capital letter unless it is a user with a lower case username on a case-sensitive wiki) followed by @, and the wiki name, unless you are adjusting rights for meta. For meta, only enter the username.
For Wikipedia, Wiktionary, Wikiquote, Wikinews, Wikiversity and Wikibooks, the wiki name is the language code followed by the word "wiki", "wiktionary", "wikiquote", "wikinews", "wikiversity" or "wikibooks" respectively. Minnan is an exception. You must enter "zh_min_nanwiki" with underscores for wikis in this language. For language codes with a "-" in the name, use an underscore instead of a hyphen (e.g. nds-nl becomes nds_nl). For a Wikisource subdomain, the syntax is user@XXwikisource where XX is the subdomain language code. For other projects, you need one of the following:
commonswiki

foundationwiki

incubatorwiki

mediawikiwiki

specieswiki

testwiki

wikimania2007wiki

For example: James@eewiki

All of the prefixes can be seen at download.wikimedia.org, including ones not listed here.
Click "Edit user groups". A new box will appear showing you what rights a user already has, and which other groups are available. To give the user new rights, choose which ones you want from the box on the right. You can select more than one by holding down the ctrl or alt key, depending on your browser. To remove user rights, highlight the ones to remove from the box on the left.
Click "Save user groups"

Encoding problems: You will occasionally have cross-wiki encoding problems where you cannot adjust the rights of a user with non-Latin characters in their name. In these cases, you need to find out the target user id and specify something like "#55@frwiki" for the user name (User ID 55, French Wikipedia). The user will be able to find out their user ID by viewing Special:Preferences. In cases of emergency desysopping, you may want to ask a developer for this ID number, rather than asking the user.

Other rights: As well as the standard administrator and bureaucrat rights, you can set Steward rights, which allows a user to set arbitrary rights for any other user on any wiki. There is also a CheckUser right; see the CheckUser policy. The "oversight" permission can also be assigned for hiding revisions containing inappropriate personal information. "Boardvote" rights are available during Wikimedia elections and must only be given to the Election Officials since this allows them to view the IPs and user agents of all voters, and to strike out invalid votes.