New wikis importers

The following page documents an official global policy. This page has been developed and approved by the community and its compliance is mandatory for all projects. 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.

New wikis importers are users who regularly deal with the import of pages to the new wikis created per the language proposal policy, from their respective test wikis (Incubator, BetaWikiversity or OldWikisource). This is a merely technical routine task that should be done by experienced importers (see the log of past imports).

As of 2011, a global group has been created; the group will be active only on newly created wikis which need such import,^[1] being disabled on each of them after the import has been completed and checked and no longer than 6 months after the wiki creation.

Technically, this is currently achieved with an opt-out wikiset which excludes from the global group all existing wikis; the group is automatically active on new wikis; the new wiki is then opted out from the global group as above, being added to the wikiset.

This group supersedes the previous practice of assigning temporary local sysop and/or importer rights to new wikis importers.

Users with established experience in importing wikis (usually Incubator sysops) are added to the global group. Make a request on Steward requests/Global permissions (SRGP). You need to prove that you have imported using XML upload before, without having caused problems or issues. The request will be approved by a steward if there is a consensus for the user to become a new wikis importer after a short period of discussion. The opinion of Language committee members, as well as bureaucrats of Incubator, BetaWikiversity or OldWikisource, obviously carries extra weight.

The global right can be removed by a steward as with other global groups.

• What's the purpose of the group?
  1. To make it easier for regular importers, and don't have to request temporary rights each time a wiki is created; reducing bureaucracy and speeding up the opening of new wikis
  2. Ensure that imports are performed by experienced users, to avoid occurrence of accidents as in the past, for instance import done using wrong character encoding or containing Incubator prefixes in titles, which means that wikis have to be deleted and re-imported.
• Isn't XML upload bad and dangerous?

  Yes, it can cause harm. But it has been used for all previous imports, causing problems when performed by inexperienced users. Now that only experienced users can import new wikis, this will add an extra level of control.

• What is a new wiki?

  A new wiki is a wiki which has been just created (see Wiki-Setup (Create) on Phabricator) and doesn't contain any content.

• What should be imported?

  Any relevant content from respectively Incubator, BetaWikiversity or OldWikisource.

This is the list of permissions, with explanations, which new wiki importers have. The automatically generated and translated list is on Special:GlobalGroupPermissions/new-wikis-importer.

• Import pages from other wikis (import)
• Import pages from a file upload (importupload)

• Delete pages (delete)
• Undelete a page (undelete)
• View deleted history entries, without their associated text (deletedhistory)
• View deleted text and changes between deleted revisions (deletedtext)
• Not create redirects from source pages when moving pages (suppressredirect)
• Change protection settings and edit cascade-protected pages (protect)

• Not be affected by IP-based rate limits (autoconfirmed)
• Forcibly create a local account for a global account (centralauth-createlocal)
• Edit the user interface (editinterface)
• Edit pages protected as "Allow only autoconfirmed users" (editsemiprotected)
• Edit sitewide CSS (editsitecss)
• Edit sitewide JSON (editsitejson)
• Edit sitewide JavaScript (editsitejs)
• Edit pages protected as "Allow only administrators" (editprotected)
• Move pages (move)
• Move pages with their subpages (move-subpages)
• Not be affected by rate limits (noratelimit)
• Perform CAPTCHA-triggering actions without having to go through the CAPTCHA (skipcaptcha)
• Override the disallowed titles or usernames list (tboverride)
• Enable two-factor authentication (oathauth-enable)

• New wikis importers: global permission · global groups (toolforge) · member list · group changelog
• Global groups
• All existing wikis: changelog
• incubator:Incubator:Site creation log
• Steward requests/Global permissions