Wordpress Answers

Editors:

They can publish any posts, edit any posts, edit any published posts, edit any pages, moderate comments, manage categories, manage links and upload files. They can also delete any posts and any pages. They can read, edit and delete private posts.

Authors:

Are able to edit their posts, publish their posts and upload files. And they can delete their posts too. No, I don’t think they can delete uploads. Uploading files happens when you write a post, which they certainly can do - but deleting them happens when you manage your uploads, and I don’t think authors have access to that part of the Dashboard.

Contributors:

They can edit their posts but cannot publish them.

I hope this helps! If you have any other confusion, try searching in the Wordpress FAQ because there’s a lot of handy information there.