While the Wiki software we use allows any user to do most things like editing pages and uploading files, there are a few features of the software that we restrict. For example, editing the front page, permanently deleting pages and their history, and banning IP addresses.
Performing these functions requires "administrator" or "sysop" access. Current Wikipedia policy is to grant this access fairly liberally to anyone who has been a Wikipedia contributor for a while and is generally a known and active member of the community. If you would like such access, send an e-mail to the Wikipedia mailing list giving your Wikipedia login name and requesting access.
Even if you are granted access, we ask that you exercise care in using these functions, especially the ability to permanently delete content and to ban users.
See Wikipedia policy on permanent deletion of pages.
Database queries
As administrator, you can directly query the database. To avoid time-consuming or malformed queries, here are some useful suggestion (please add more):
List all articles that link to a file on http://meta.wikipedia.com (takes 2-3 seconds):
SELECT cur_title FROM cur WHERE cur_text LIKE "%http://meta.wikipedia.com/upload/%"