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wikimaniawiki: add editsemiprotected to extendedconfirmed group
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Description

Extended confirmed rights are sometimes given to staff/volunteers without local autoconfirmed rights to allow them to edit protected pages. However, the extendedconfirmed group at the moment includes only the extendedconfirmed right. This means that such users can edit extendedconfirmed-protected pages, but not semi-protected pages, an ostensibly lower protection level. Local administrators are unable to grant the confirmed group, so the only workaround is to increase the protection level of semi-protected pages to extendedconfirmed-protected, which is undesirable.

I request that the editsemiprotected right be added to the extendedconfirmed group.

Event Timeline

Another solution would be to allow administrators to grant and remove the confirmed user group, yes?

Change #1268833 had a related patch set uploaded (by Anzx; author: Anzx):

[operations/mediawiki-config@master] wikimaniawiki: add editsemiprotected userright to extendedconfirmed usergroup

https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/1268833

Change #1268833 merged by jenkins-bot:

[operations/mediawiki-config@master] wikimaniawiki: add editsemiprotected userright to extendedconfirmed usergroup

https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/1268833

Mentioned in SAL (#wikimedia-operations) [2026-04-08T07:26:37Z] <wmde-fisch@deploy1003> Started scap sync-world: Backport for [[gerrit:1268833|wikimaniawiki: add editsemiprotected userright to extendedconfirmed usergroup (T421770)]]

Mentioned in SAL (#wikimedia-operations) [2026-04-08T07:28:26Z] <wmde-fisch@deploy1003> wmde-fisch, anzx: Backport for [[gerrit:1268833|wikimaniawiki: add editsemiprotected userright to extendedconfirmed usergroup (T421770)]] synced to the testservers (see https://wikitech.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mwdebug). Changes can now be verified there.

Mentioned in SAL (#wikimedia-operations) [2026-04-08T07:33:31Z] <wmde-fisch@deploy1003> Finished scap sync-world: Backport for [[gerrit:1268833|wikimaniawiki: add editsemiprotected userright to extendedconfirmed usergroup (T421770)]] (duration: 06m 54s)

I wonder if there is an unintentional difference, misunderstanding, or other issue leading to this on the Wikimania wiki, but not other wikis.

For comparison:

Generally speaking, extendedconfirmed is granted automatically in a similar way as autoconfirmed but with a later threshold. And so naturally anyone in extendedconfirmed is already a member of autoconfirmed (which grants the editsemiprotected right).

I've not heard of such automatic group being also manually granted to people, and that might create confusion. By default the software does not allow this. It seems wikimaniawiki was configured to let Administrators grant membership to this group. Wikipedia, for comparison, does not do that.

Wikipedia instead has the dedicated "confirmed" group for this purpose (as distinct from autoconfirmed to avoid confusion, but grants more or less the same rights). Perhaps Wikimania could use that instead? This will be more familiar to admins and users as well, and would benefit from existing documentation, expectations, and habits.

If you want, Wikimania wiki could configure its "confirmed" group to include the extendedconfirmed right if you generally would grant the same in these circumstances? Or does Wikimania need two distinct processes for manually granting a new user a confirmed-type user group.

Anoop claimed this task.