Editing Help:Assigning permissions (section)

== Promoting users to Sysops and Bureaucrats ==

The [[Special:UserRights]] page allows you (if you have access) to set which groups a user is in. A common task would be to put a user into the 'Sysop' group. This will grant the user various extra rights, such as deleting pages, and blocking users. See [[Help:Sysops and permissions]] for more details.

Obviously giving a user such rights implies that you '''trust''' the user, both in terms of being non-malicious, and also as somebody with sufficient competence in using the wiki software, and in dealing with the wiki community. People hoping to become sysops should read [[Help:Sysops and permissions]]. However it should be noted that actions of a sysop user are (almost) entirely reversible, by other sysop users, and so it can be a good idea to dish out these extra permissions to a number of users in order to
* spread the workload of day-to-day sysop operations such as blocking vandals and deleting pages.
* make things more democratic, and decrease any perception of a single dictator running the community
* allow competent users the power they need to make progress with wiki refactoring.
* reward valued contributors/community members