User:Bonjourleworld/sandbox

Governance
In principle, Wikipedia’s system of government operates off of a base of equal and open access, as well as consensus-driven democratic decision-making. Conventional managerial systems often seen in the worlds of business and politics are absent. However, a collection of "formal roles" fulfilling certain functions and providing general oversight have led some to speak of a "parahierarchy" within the community. Three primary roles exist—each one with a greater level of permissions than the last—, as well as several other permissions sets assigned automatically to Stewards and selectively to Bureaucrats and Administrators. Criticism against this system have been leveled by academics and community members alike. These have principally targeted "lack of clarity" concerning governance structures and the concentration of power in the hands of an emerging elite.

Stewards
At the top of this organizational structure are the stewards. As of February 2015, they are 37 stewards active across all Wikimedia projects. Elections for new stewards are held on an annual or bi-annual basis and users from across the entire Wikimedia community are eligible to vote. Prospective stewards must obtain an 80% approval rating in order to be selected.

Candidates for stewardship must be administrators on at least one Wikimedia project and are generally expected to have had a history of inter-project work and experience holding positions of trust. Name visibility is a significant asset, as is multilingualism and fluency in English. Of 37 stewards, only one is monolingual in English.

Stewards are granted the capacity to "perform any task that any other user group can" and at their own discretion. However, they are obliged to follow Wikipedia policy in doing so. Their permissions extend across all Wikipedia language versions and Wikimedia projects. As stewards are expected to act as an independent voice representing the entire Wikimedia community, they are restricted from employing their enhanced editing rights on their project of origin.

Because of their high-profile role and extensive permissions, Stewards are required to provide proof of identity and documentation demonstrating they exceed the age of 18 to the Wikimedia Foundation to obtain their position.

Bureaucrats
Bureaucrats are administrators tasked with the power to alter user permissions and usernames. Their primary role is to assign administrative permissions to users approved through the RfA process for administrator status. Bureaucrats are not entitled to use their own discretion in assigning enhanced user rights, but rather are required to bow to community consensus as expressed through voting procedure. While they play an important role in the internal workings of the Wikipedia community, their job tends to be simplistic.

Even in major projects, the number of bureaucrats tends to be small, the only exception being the English version on which there are 32 as of September 2015. Candidates for bureaucrat-ship are elected according to the same 80% support benchmark as for stewards. Because bureaucrats do not fill a time or labor-intensive function, each project only requires so many bureaucrats. As a result, the number of applications to RfB and the number selected have been in decline for some time.

Administrators
Administrators are the front lines of Wikipedia governance. They are comprised of "experienced users" whose job it is to monitor and regulate community activity; this applies to both article editing and behind-the-scenes interaction. Administrators have the ability, among others, to ban/block users, rollback edits, and apply protections to articles. Candidates for higher levels of responsibility are drawn from this pool of users.

Any registered user has the right to request adminship through the RfA voting process. However, successful applications almost always meet certain expectations. Applicants are traditionally users with good standing in the community who have a diverse background in vandalism control, article contribution, and Wikipedia policy formation. The number of edits the prospective administrator has made also weighs heavily on the selection process, being the most common reason for an unsuccessful request.

Administrators perform a very broad range of jobs across a single Wikipedia project. As a result, the number which each project has does not tend to reach a de facto cap as there’s always more administrative work to be done. That being said, the number of new applications for adminship has declined so significantly in past years that the phenomenon has attracted the attention of major news outlets and information science researchers alike.

Checkusers & Oversighters
CheckUsers are members of the Wikipedia community with the ability to view the IP addresses of users. Their job is to determine whether or not a single individual is editing on multiple accounts, typically to better identify and deter article vandalism.

Oversighters are granted the power to conceal past edits and the usernames associated with them in an article’s revision history. Once done, concealed edits can only be viewed by other oversighters and stewards (who automatically are granted oversight permissions). The process by which an oversighter expunges a past revision is referred to as "suppression" and may only be used under a select and enumerated set of circumstances. Accountability is ensured by other oversighters and the Arbitration Committee.

Although no formal rule requires it, checkusers and oversighters are by tradition administrators. However, not all administrators are checkusers or oversighters. To whom these responsibilities are assigned is determined by the Arbitration Committee. By virtue of their access to sensitive information and the consequent need for discretion, users with these permissions are required—like stewards—to provide evidence of their identity and age to the Wikimedia Foundation.

Rollbackers
After registered users, rollbackers are the first rung upwards in the Wikipedia governance system. These are users entrusted with the ability to roll back a page to an original version with the click of a button. Rollbackers’ number one priority is to identify and reverse vandalism in a timely manner. As such, projects tend to have a large number of users with this permission and expected qualifications are not high. Rollbackers are not appointed by consensus but by administrators who themselves have rollback abilities.

Criticism
Most criticisms of Wikipedia management target problems stemming from the project’s ostensibly-structureless governance system. Wikipedia hosts a vast archive of information and an equally massive community of editors constantly adding to, modifying, and removing from it. When combined with a lack of clarity about who controls what, one critic asserts that the need for regulation simply outstrips the ability of administrators to provide it.

Vandalism control, in particular, has represented a major problem for the project. To combat it, various policing measures have been established over its lifetime which, in turn, leave a great deal of discretion to administrators and rollbackers. Some critics have noted this allows for the disproportionate "accumulation of power in one section of the Wikipedia community." They go on to say that administrators have consequently become not only "enforcers of policy," but have also begun to make "‘moral’ decisions about user behavior."

Researchers have observed that members of the community at several different levels share outside critics’ concerns about Wikipedia’s system of control. One unregistered user was cited as saying that founder Jimmy Wales created the "structureless of tyranny," another comments on the relative lack of permission-holder accountability systems.

A culture of technocracy has been labeled a developing problem for the Wikipedia community. According to one researcher, the complex system of rules and regulations, in addition to the concentration of power in the hands of those who best understand them, creates an environment in which "editors are dominating the process, to the detriment of the more expert contributors of articles, and growth has stopped.