MediaWiki default

This is the username used by various maintenance scripts that edit the MediaWiki namespace. These scripts are part of MediaWiki and are used by developers for scheduled or manual maintenance of system messages and configuration pages. This user account is not a bot in the traditional sense and is unaffected by blocks.

Maintenance scripts using this account include:

deleteEqualMessages.php, used to delete local message customizations which are not different anymore from the default value.
The MediaWiki installer, which makes the first edit on a new wiki (creating the main page).
initWikiConfig.php and changeWikiConfig.php in the GrowthExperiments extension, used to initialize and edit community configuration.

In the past, if the MediaWiki default account name did not exist, edits made by this script had a user ID of zero. Such edits show up as anonymous edits in the page history, with a link to the user contributions instead of the user page. (This behavior was fixed a couple years ago; today, the account gets automatically created if necessary.)

If there is a problem with the behavior of this account, please file a bug report at Wikimedia Phabricator. (When the script is triggered manually, the edit summary usually links to the task where problems can be reported. Otherwise, you can file a new task with the #wikimedia-maintenance-script-run tag.) Urgent reports can be made on the #wikimedia-tech^connect channel on irc.libera.chat.