User:Ed Poor/Rights

It's a common mistake to assert that anyone has rights at Wikipedia. Aside from the technical matter of "sysop rights" or "bureaucrat rights", Wikipedia grants no rights whatsoever. That's right, none. In fact, the moment you click save page, you lose almost any conceivable right over what you just typed: everything except the original credit for having written it before it was edited mercilessly and redistributed! Note that you do retain the copyright to any original submission you make (assuming you had the copyright to begin with), but you agree to release that submission under GFDL.

Wikipedia is a volunteer organization, and volunteers here have no rights or privileges. Wikipedians have only duties, voluntarily assumed.

Our duty as volunteers is to create a free encyclopedia filled with accurate, neutral articles for the benefit of the general public.

Anyone is welcome to join us, as long as they come to help us create this kind of encyclopedia. Others will be shown to the door.

However, some users have been entrusted to perform administrative tasks or enforce policy. They are granted extra technical abilities, as described in the following project pages:
 * sysop rights
 * bureaucrat rights

Also, everyone (whether they have contributed to Wikipedia or not) has the right to fork (protected under the terms of the GFDL) and the right to leave. In most cases, most people may enjoy the privilege known imprecisely as the right to vanish, but legal and safety considerations prevent it from being a true right.