Wikipedia:Formal organization
Essay on editing Wikipedia
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The formalities of Wikipedia administration are described, with links to the appropriate Wikipedia pages. This information can be helpful to Wikipedia contributors in understanding how Wikipedia is organized.
 | This is an essay. It contains the advice or opinions of one or more Wikipedia contributors. This page is not an encyclopedia article or a Wikipedia policy, as it has not been reviewed by the community. |
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No attempt is made to evaluate whether Wikipedia is in fact governed in the way it claims to be governed, nor is any attempt made to evaluate the adequacy of this structure to meet the ever-changing demands upon an online encyclopedia. This discussion is based entirely upon the English language Wikipedia; its applicability to other language Wikipedias has not been examined.
For a discussion on the various user access levels, see Wikipedia:User access levels.
Overview
The contributors or editors of Wikipedia participate subject to a number of policies and guidelines governing behavior and content. These rules are supervised by various authorities, which are discussed below.
Editors
Editors, or Wikipedians, are any regular contributor to Wikipedia, whether as a registered user or by using a temporary account.
Administrators
Administrators are users entrusted to perform several administrative tasks on the project, such as:
- Blocking and unblocking accounts, temporary accounts, and IP addresses
- Protecting, unprotecting, deleting, and undeleting pages
- Deleting revisions, edit summaries, and/or the username used to make an edit
- Granting the confirmed, extended confirmed, pending changes reviewer, new page reviewer, page mover, template editor, autopatrolled, rollback, file mover, account creator, event coordinator, mass message sender, temporary account IP viewer, IP block exempt, edit filter helper, edit filter manager and election clerk user groups[a]
Bureaucrats
Bureaucrats, known as 'crats for short, are some of the most trusted users on the project, with the bureaucrat user group being the most advanced permission able to be granted locally.[b]
Bureaucrats may grant and remove the administrator,[c] bot,[d] and interface administrator[e] flags from an account, as well as grant the bureaucrat flag.[f] Current Wikipedia policy requires bureaucrats to also be administrators, although this is not a technical requirement and is not present on some other wikis.
Arbitration Committee
Members of the Arbitration Committee (referred to as ArbCom), or Arbs, act in concert or in sub-groups to impose binding solutions to conduct disputes the community has been unable to resolve, mainly by defining what constitutes a violation in such disputes and imposing sanctions, such as bans and blocks upon users.
ArbCom has very wide latitude in adjudication, as indicated by the following freedoms: ArbCom is free to widen or to divert a case to any subject of their choosing.[1] They are empowered to rule preemptively based upon conjectures about the future.[2][3] Rulings need not follow guidelines and policies; deliberations are not based upon the "rule of law".[4][5] They are free to adopt opinion,[6] and are not required to assess "who said what in the past".[3]
Though disputes commonly arise over content, with the exception of topic bans the Arbitration Committee explicitly excludes all content issues from their deliberations and focuses upon disciplinary actions.[7]
- The difference between edit warring as disruptive behavior and as an attempt to straighten out what an article says may depend upon who is considering the issue.[8]
Although edit warring in principle refers to article editing, in practice it is considered disruptive to argue too much on the Talk page as well, and extended discussion may be viewed as tendentious editing, or refusal to get the point, or interfering with consensus,[9] all forms of misconduct and therefore subject to discipline.
Aside from enforcing an end to disputes, the Arbitration Committee can expunge material from any form of usual access, or give specific users the ability to remove some types of edits from the revision history, for example, material considered defamatory.[10] These powers also can be exercised by Stewards of Wikimedia.[11]
The Arbitration Committee can request Bureaucrats to exercise de-Adminship under the circumstances described under Administrators.
Arbitrators are elected annually in one-year or overlapping two-year terms, and also can be appointed directly by Wales or the Wikimedia Foundation. The election rules are debated each year. Although nomination is subject only to rather broad criteria, in practice only Administrators have succeeded in being selected as Arbitrators.[12]
Wikimedia Foundation
Wikipedia is one of a dozen projects of Wikimedia,[13] an organization owned and operated by the Wikimedia Foundation.[14] Among the functionaries of Wikimedia are the Stewards[15] of the Wikimedia wikis who have complete access to the wiki interface on all Wikimedia wikis, including the ability to change any and all user rights and groups, view user information in cases of abuse, and so on; and the SysOps of the Wikimedia Meta-Wiki,[16] who manage and maintain the Wikimedia Foundation servers. The tools used by the Stewards in exercising control over the wikis of Wikimedia are described in a handbook.[17] They are guided by the Stewards policy, and are elected.[18] Some indication of the control given to Stewards and System Administrators can be found on the Wikimedia web pages.[19]
The overall control is by the ten-member Wikimedia Board of Trustees of whom Jimmy Wales is Chairman Emeritus and a member. The present membership is found here and some historical data here.