This dump file contains information about the current special roles granted to registered editors in that Wikipedia. Therefore, this is a static snapshot of the assignment of roles among users at the time of creation of the dump.

If you are rather interested in tracking the assignment and revocation of special roles over time, you can find data about those actions in the dump of logged events (compressed XML file), which can also be processed with WikiDAT. Role change events correspond to <type> = rights.

Important: Currently, SQL dump files are only compatible with MySQL or MariaDB databases. Support for additional database engines like PostgreSQL is currently contemplated in WikiDAT's development roadmap but not implemented, yet.

Standard filename format

These files are named using the following format:

File: {lang}-{date}-{user_groups}.sql.{compress}

Examples: eswiki-20150429-user_groups.sql.gz

All fields are mandatory and shown in {}. The meaning of each field is:

  • lang: Identifier of the Wikipedia language. The current convention is to prepend the corresponding ISO-639 code for the language to the term wiki, identifying Wikipedia dumps. Dumps from other Wikimedia projects use their own identifier ("wikiquote", "wikibooks", etc.).
  • date: The date on which the dump file was produced. For large dump files, this date does not correspond to the date of the last revision included in the file (compression and integrity checks may take some time).
  • user_groups: Identifier of the type of dump file, in this case SQL dump with information about special roles assigned to each registered editor at the time of producing the dump.
  • sql: Type of data file, in this case a dump in SQL format suitable only for MySQL or MariaDB databases.
  • compress: Extension identifying the algorithm used to compress the file. To date, SQL dumps are only compressed with gzip.

File content

SQL table fields

This file contains an SQL dump of the MediaWiki user_groups table. The following excerpt provides the definition of this table as embedded in the SQL dump.

mysql> describe user_groups;
+----------+-----------------+------+-----+---------+-------+
| Field    | Type            | Null | Key | Default | Extra |
+----------+-----------------+------+-----+---------+-------+
| ug_user  | int(5) unsigned | NO   | PRI | 0       |       |
| ug_group | varbinary(255)  | NO   | PRI |         |       |
+----------+-----------------+------+-----+---------+-------+
2 rows in set (0.00 sec)

Hence, each row in the table shows information about a single role currently granted to a certain user, at the time of dump production. As a result, users who hold various roles simultaneously have several entries, displaying one role per row (see below for an example).

Besides, it is important to remark that the default table definition, embedded in the dump file, sets the table engine to InnoDB. However, since WikiDAT is focused on fast analytics instead of favoring concurrent insertions/deletions, users can modify on WikiDAT's config file the database engine to use MyISAM (MySQL) or Aria (MariaDB) instead.

User roles

The following table summarizes the most relevant user roles and their meaning. This is not a complete list. You can check the user access levels page on each Wikipedia language to find out the complete list of roles in that community.

Tag Role Name Description
abusefilter Edit Filter managers These users can create, modify and delete edit filters.
accountcreator Account creator This right provides accesss to a special tool for opening a large number of accounts to people who request them. Additional info.
autoreviewer Autopatrolled Previously known as autoreviewer (hece the tag). Users with this role have their pages automatically marked as patrolled on the New Pages list.
bot Bots (software programs) These user accounts are approved beforehand to make specific type of edits on an automated or semi-automated fashion, driven by software programs. Important: despite a large proportion of bots are correctly identified as such in this table in most Wikipedia languages, there can be cases of bots in some languages that have not been flagged as such in this table. Therefore, it is not guaranteed that this table provides a complete list of all bots in a certain Wikipedia language.
bureaucrat Bureaucrats Exceptionally trusted users who are granted this role by the community upon request. Among other actions, they can add users to the administrator and bot group, and they can also add users to their own group (but not remove them).
checkuser Checkusers These users can access Special:Checkuser to review all IP addresses used by a user account editing the English Wikipedia, a list of all edits made by a certain IP or all users who have edited under the same IP address.
confirmed Autoconfirmed and Confirmed users The Autoconfrimed role is automatically granted by MediaWiki to users who meet certain restrictions for minium trust (for instance, in English Wikipedia is grated to accouts that are more than 4 days old and have made at least 10 edits). This level is required to move pages, edit semi-protected pages and upload files. The confirmed role is manually granted by administrators upon requests from users. Provides the same rights as Autoconfirmed.
ipblock-exempt Ipblock-exempt These users are excluded from autoblocks and blocks of single or ranges of IP addresses that are not performed with the "anonymous users only" setting.
oversight Oversight These users can hide revision of pages from any user permanently, using the Special:HideRevision tool. Besides, they can view a summary log of such actions on Special:Oversight. These users must be at least 18 years old and are request to disclosure their real identity to Wikimedia Foundation.
reviewer Pending changes reviewer These users can review edits from other users flagged by the pending changes protection plugin.
rollbacker Rollback Provides access to MediaWiki's rollback feature, that allows to revert the last consecutive edits made by a user on a given page with a sigle mouse click.
sysop Administrator This role is granted by the community upon request and after a voting process (whose rules may vary from one Wikipedia language to another). Among other actions, administrators can delete, protect and unprotect pages, block and unblock users and edit fully protected pages. additional details.

Example content

The following code snippet shows an excerpt of the table content recovered from a dump file of this type.

MariaDB [enwiki_20150304]> select * from user_groups limit 20;
+---------+----------------+
| ug_user | ug_group       |
+---------+----------------+
|       1 | autoreviewer   |
|       1 | reviewer       |
|       2 | sysop          |
|       4 | sysop          |
|      11 | sysop          |
|      24 | checkuser      |
|      24 | founder        |
|      24 | oversight      |
|      24 | sysop          |
|      31 | sysop          |
|      32 | accountcreator |
|      33 | sysop          |
|      43 | sysop          |
|      51 | bureaucrat     |
|      51 | sysop          |
|      52 | abusefilter    |
|      52 | afttest        |
|      59 | sysop          |
|      62 | sysop          |
|      63 | sysop          |
+---------+----------------+
20 rows in set (0.00 sec)