Help:Mass account creation

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Logging in is useful and creating an account is recommended; sometimes it's needed to create many user accounts at once on a wiki in the same moment and place, typically for an editing workshop where "students" are required to register before editing. If you're organizing such a workshop, you might be unable to create all accounts during it, because many wikis pose some limits. Unless you can determine that you won't hit the limit, you have to take some simple precautions.

• If you want them to create the account on their own:
  1. Before the workshop: tell them to create their own accounts, if they don't have any, at home (give instructions).
  2. During the workshop: don't panic! You only need to login on each machine with an account with noratelimit right; if you don't have one, ask yours to be added to the relevant user group. Once you/they are logged with such account, Special:CreateAccount will look almost the same, and when the users of each machine have created their account they'll just have to logout and login with their new account.
• If you don't:
  1. Before the workshop: first, determine (or ask) the username and email for each account, you'll need it in the form (creation "by email" with automatic password sent); then:
     1. create them in advance, slowly across the days, so that you don't hit the limit;
     2. use your account with noratelimit right or get it added to your account and create them all at once;
     3. ask someone with noratelimit right (if there's a specific group there's probably some process to request their intervention; otherwise just ask directly or on the general request pages), send the list, get the job done.
  2. During the workshop: still, don't panic. Get noratelimit right added to your account with an emergency request (if you don't have it) and... type furiously or let students do it as above.

If you're super-wise, you may also create at least a handful of generic accounts (such as "EditLab1" etc.) so that you can lend them to the students in case everything else fails; at least they'll be able to edit as logged in users. Note that, even after registration, newly registered users editing from the same IP may be forced to slow down their edits.

Additionally, although not recommended unless you're the wiki system administrator, you can ask the configuration to be changed temporarily: for Wikimedia projects, see m:Special:MyLanguage/How to request lift of an IP cap.

But if you want to do a mass account creation from existing names and passwords and you are the wiki system administrator, you can use e.g. the ImportUsers extension to do it in a less tedious fashion.

See also

• wikitech:Increasing account creation threshold