Administrators on the English Wikipedia are expected to have an intimate understanding of Wikipedia's policies and guidelines, as well as consistently demonstrate comprehension and good judgment with their application of them. This is extremely important, since administrators are entrusted with extra abilities that are unavailable to regular users on Wikipedia.

The following pages listed below are considered highly recommended reading material that detail prerequisite knowledge required by an administrator:

• Five pillars of Wikipedia
• Founding principles: Core principles guiding all Wikimedia projects.

• Administrators
• Administrators' guide
• Administrators' noticeboard, where admin issues are discussed
  • Administrators' noticeboard where 3RR violations are reported
  • Administrators' noticeboard where incidents are reported
• Administrative action review noticeboard, where administrative actions by administrators can be discussed and reviewed
• Wikipedia:List of policies

• Banning policy
• Blocking IP addresses
• Blocking policy

• Accountability
• Closing discussions
• Ending RfCs
• Requests for closure noticeboard
• Rough consensus
• Supervote

• Biographies of living persons
• Neutral point of view
• No original research
• Verifiability

• List of controversial issues
• NPOV dispute
• Wheel war

• Copyrights

• Criteria for speedy deletion
• Deletion guidelines for administrators
• Deletion policy
• Deletion process
• Undeletion policy
• Revision deletion policy

• Protection policy

• Backlogged processes requiring attention
• Changes related to Wikipedia:Requests for administrator attention
• Enforcement of arbitration rulings

• Rollback

• User account security

• Dealing with vandalism
• Vandalbot

• Advice for new administrators
• Editing the main page
• Fixing cut and paste moves
• Goals of the adminship process
• Image use policy
• MediaWiki Administrator's Handbook
• Office actions
• Open proxies
• Requested moves/Closing instructions
• Village stocks – some things administrators have done by mistake in the past. Laugh, and avoid repetition.
• What adminship is not
• The mushroom effect