Extension:ChangeAuthor

This extension is professionally maintained by the WikiTeq team.

WikiTeq provides official support for MediaWiki LTS releases only. It may work with other MediaWiki releases.

MediaWiki extensions manual

ChangeAuthor Release status: stable
Implementation	Special page
Description	Allows for changing the author of a revision.
Author(s)	Roan Kattouw
Maintainer(s)	WikiTeq team
Latest version	1.3.0 (2022-01-07)
Compatibility policy	For every MediaWiki release that is a Long Term Support release there is a corresponding branch in the extension.
MediaWiki	1.35, 1.39
License	GNU General Public License 3.0 or later
Download	Download extension Git [?]: Download Git master browse repository (Phabricator · GitHub) commit history repository contributors (GitHub) code review
Added rights changeauthor
Quarterly downloads	4 (Ranked 125th)
Translate the ChangeAuthor extension if it is available at translatewiki.net
Issues	Open tasks · Report a bug

ChangeAuthor is an extension that allows for changing the author of a revision, e.g. an edit made by Alice can be changed to look like it was made by Bob instead. Of course, only privileged users can do this, and all changes are logged.

Installation

• Download and move the extracted ChangeAuthor folder to your extensions/ directory.
  Developers and code contributors should install the extension from Git instead, using:cd extensions/
git clone https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/mediawiki/extensions/ChangeAuthor
• Add the following code at the bottom of your LocalSettings.php file:

  wfLoadExtension( 'ChangeAuthor' );
  

•  Done – Navigate to Special:Version on your wiki to verify that the extension is successfully installed.

Permissions

You will probably not want to allow every user to use this extension. To control who can and who can't use ChangeAuthor, two approaches can be used:

Using existing groups

Add any of the following lines to LocalSettings.php to allow existing groups of users to use ChangeAuthor:

$wgGroupPermissions['sysop']['changeauthor'] = true; // Only sysops can use ChangeAuthor. This is the recommended setup
$wgGroupPermissions['bureaucrat']['changeauthor'] = true; // Only bureaucrats can use ChangeAuthor

If you have created any custom groups in LocalSettings.php, you can allow these groups to use ChangeAuthor by adding

$wgGroupPermissions['groupname']['changeauthor'] = true;

to LocalSettings.php (replace 'groupname' with the name of your custom group).

NOTE: If a user is in multiple groups, they will be able to use ChangeAuthor even if that's allowed for only one of those groups. E.g.: if group A can't use ChangeAuthor but group B can, a user in both group A and B will be allowed to use ChangeAuthor.

Creating a new group

You can also create a separate group for users who can use ChangeAuthor. To do this, add the following line to LocalSettings.php:

$wgGroupPermissions['changeauthor']['changeauthor'] = true;

This creates a new group named 'changeauthor'. Only users in that group can use ChangeAuthor. You can add users to the changeauthor group using the Special:Userrights special page.

Use

You can change a revision's author using the Special:ChangeAuthor special page. First, enter the name of a page in the input box and click the "Go" button. You will now see a list of the last 50 revisions of the target page. Note that all usernames are in textboxes. To change the author of a revision, simply change the username in the associated textbox. Add a comment in the comment textbox (optional), click the "Change author(s)" button and you're done. If the revision whose author you want to change isn't among the 50 latest, you need to access it by its revision ID. You can find out a revision's ID by looking it up in the page history and click the link stating the date and time the revision was made. In your address bar, you will now see a URL that ends in:

index.php?title=Pagename&oldid=12345

Here, 12345 is the revision ID. You can now enter the revision ID (12345) in Special:ChangeAuthor's input box and follow the normal procedure. As a shortcut, you can also go to Special:ChangeAuthor/Main_Page or Special:ChangeAuthor/12345 and bypass the input box altogether. NOTE: In the event you have both a page called 12345 and a revision ID 12345, you will need to access the page using :12345 (i.e. prepend a colon).

Logs

A log of all author changes is maintained at Special:Log/changeauth. All author changes also appear in recent changes.

Licensing and downloads

The extension is available under the GNU General Public License version 3 or later, and can be downloaded from Git.

The software is provided as-is. Updates will be made where critical vulnerabilities are discovered.

Translating ChangeAuthor

If ChangeAuthor hasn't been translated to your language (completely), feel free to help out. Visit translatewiki.net for more information.

Contact

ChangeAuthor is currently maintained by WikiTeq. If you have any questions, complaints, feature requests, found a bug, or any other reason, use the discussion page.