The Test Wiki at wiki.xyrael.net, 2006–2008

The Test Wiki in brief

It started as one Wikipedia administrator's personal test wiki, called Where's Test Wiki; its community discussions begin in June 2006. On 1 July 2006, with other people now using it, it was renamed The Test Wiki because, as the change was explained on its community portal, the wiki belonged to all of them.

How anyone became a sysop

Rights were given on trust borrowed from other wikis. The main page put it in one line: anyone could become a sysop by asking a bureaucrat who knew them from elsewhere, such as other wikis or IRC. To prove who they were, users linked their user page on Wikipedia, Wikia or another wiki from their Test Wiki user page, then wrote on that outside page I am (username) on The Test Wiki.

• 2007. Bureaucrats promoted users through Special:Makesysop and flagged bots through Special:Makebot; the main page asked users not to flag their own main account as a bot.
• 2008. Requests moved to a page called Requests for Rights, with a form that asked for a link to an edit confirming the user's identity. Bureaucrats left a standard welcome notice on each new admin's talk page.
• Why people came. Requests from August 2008 give plain reasons: to see first-hand what the tools do, or to practise before standing for adminship on a home wiki, in one case the Finnish Wikipedia.

Asked in December 2006 how the wiki differed from the Wikipedia sandbox, a regular answered that it was like the sandbox but bigger, with far fewer rules, and that anyone could be an admin. That is still the idea behind the admin test wikis listed today.

Its rules: test, have fun, don't ruin others' fun

The basic guidelines on the main page were three: test the sysop and bureaucrat tools, have fun, and do not ruin others' fun. The main page itself was protected so that nobody took it too far; by 2008 a note added that any sysop could unprotect it anyway.

• Vandalism meant anything that annoyed or blocked another user's tests: insults, mass page moves, mass deletion of pages others were testing on, and blocking people for no reason. Admins were told to delete or revert it on sight.
• Speedy deletion had a one-line policy in the wiki's own joking style: a sysop could delete a page whenever they felt the need.
• Copyright had no wiki-wide licence. Contributors could choose how to license their edits, and all rights otherwise stayed with their authors.

Stewards, sheriffs and bureaucrats

Because so many users held admin rights, the wiki needed a level above them. Like Wikimedia, it had stewards, who could change any user's rights, use CheckUser, run database queries and hide revisions for good. In August 2006, after bureaucrats had kept removing each other's rights, members agreed to cut the number of stewards to a single one; there were again three by 2007 and four in 2008.

In June 2007 the wiki adopted a steward actions policy, modelled on Wikipedia's office actions: stewards could delete, protect or blank pages and block or desysop users outside the normal process, and admins were warned that undoing such an action could cost them their rights. Stewards also appointed sheriffs, six of them in October 2007, who could carry out steward actions too.

The software: MediaWiki 1.11 and its extensions

The wiki's version page, archived in October 2007, shows a pre-release MediaWiki 1.11 on PHP 5.2.0 and MySQL 5.0.27. By March 2008 it ran the finished 1.11.1 on PHP 5.2.5 and MySQL 5.0.45.

• Rights tools: CheckUser, Oversight, Renameuser, Desysop, MakeBot and Makesysop — the last two being how bureaucrats promoted users at the time. On a current MediaWiki the same changes are made on Special:UserRights.
• For admins: Deleted user contributions, a new-user log and a username blacklist.
• For editors: ParserFunctions from 2007; Cite (footnotes), Gadgets and an Ajax login were added by 2008.

How big it grew

Roughly two in five accounts held administrator rights, which was the whole point. In less than a year the wiki doubled in users and pages, while only a few dozen pages counted as content: almost everything else was user pages, talk pages and pages made to be deleted.

Its most-read pages tell the same story. In 2007 the top ten were mostly user pages and the community portal; in 2008 the main page led with 1,883 views, followed by the talk pages of two stewards and by Requests for Rights with 791.

Its addresses, and the links that remain

The Internet Archive holds about 2,500 captures of wiki.xyrael.net: 2,176 from 2007 and 324 from 2008. The last archived wiki page dates from October 2008, and by 2011 the subdomain served unrelated pages.

Links outlived the wiki. In October 2026 the English Wikipedia still had 92 links to wiki.xyrael.net on 74 pages, mostly user pages and talk-page archives from 2007 and 2008, plus a request for adminship and Village pump archives. Those links now lead to this page.

The Test Wiki at thetestwiki.org since 2010

A wiki of the same name has run at thetestwiki.org since January 2010; its public logs begin on 7 January 2010. Its main page keeps the old basic rules almost word for word, including the confirmation sentence and test the sysop tools, have fun, don't ruin others' fun, and adds two more: no swearing, and nothing stupid.

In October 2026 it ran MediaWiki 1.44.0 and reported 890 registered users, 252 of them administrators. Its pages do not describe how it relates to the wiki at wiki.xyrael.net, and this guide makes no claim about that. How to ask for rights there today is on our page about admin test wikis.