Guild Wars Wiki:Adminship/Draft-2007-9-16

The English language Guild Wars Wiki is administered by the community. New administrators are selected by a democratic process in the English language Guild Wars Wiki. There are two levels of adminship: sysop and bureaucrat.

Administration and ArenaNet
ArenaNet are not formally involved in the administrator selection process. Community decisions may not be appealed to them. ArenaNet staff may participate in the administrator selection process just as any other contributor in good standing, but their opinions are given equal weight as other members of the community.

Sysops
Sysops are administrators who perform cleanup tasks (deleting pages, undoing page move vandalism) and can block accounts and IP addresses according to the rules of the Guild Wars Wiki policy. Sysops also protect critical or unusually contentious pages from editing. Sysops are granted reasonable discretion, but they are expected to apply policy rigorously and respect consensus. Sysops are expected (but not required) to provide a publicly reachable e-mail address or other means of private contact.

Sysops are selected by a review process based on nominations. New nominations may be made by any contributor in good standing, and nominators may nominate any contributor in good standing, including themselves. The nomination is reviewed for a fixed period of time, after which a bureaucrat will assess the community consensus and appoint the nominee if the consensus is in favor.

Sysops are appointed for life, but may voluntarily resign. Their status may also be formally examined by the arbitration committee.

For a complete list of sysops, see Special:Listadmins/sysop.

To start a new nomination, see Guild Wars Wiki:Requests for adminship.

Bureaucrats
Bureaucrats have the power to appoint or revoke the administrative status of users based on community decisions. Additionally, the group of bureaucrats, as long as there are at least 2, form an arbitration committee, who are the final arbiters on the English language Guild Wars Wiki of user conduct, including that of administrators and issues with an individual user's conduct (but not general content decisions).

The Arbitration committee is in charge of (but not limited to) cases where enforcing policy has not resolved the case or no applicable policy exists. This includes specificially ongoing hostiliy among users or groups of users, disruptive behaviour and trolling (at least until a policy dealing with profanity and trolling is effective).2

The group of bureaucrats is mutually exclusive from the group of sysops -- any status as sysop is temporarily revoked while appointed as a bureaucrat.1 Bureaucrats have some extra user rights, such as editing protected pages and viewing deleted pages, but are forbidden from executing page deletions/undeletions or user blocks/unblocks (although they may unblock their own account for arbitration purposes if necessary). While ArbComm injunctions and rulings may involve those, the enforcement of such is left to sysops. Any revoked sysop status is reinstated at the end of the bureaucrat term, or upon resignation.

Due to their important role in the community, bureaucrats are held to a higher standard than sysops. All bureaucrats are expected to provide explanations for the use of their powers, and they are additionally expected to respond to any questions about their actions from anyone, including via e-mail. All bureaucrats are required to list a publicly reachable e-mail address.

Bureaucrats are generally appointed for fixed terms of 6 months from their date of appointment. The terms are staggered to have at least one bureaucrat active at all times. New bureaucrats are elected to an open position by community-wide open elections. Bureaucrats may run for re-election arbitrarily often. Any contributor (even non-administrators) in good standing may run for an open position. See Guild Wars Wiki:Elections for a description of the bureaucrat election process and a list of current open elections.

Bureaucrats may resign at any time. Sitting bureaucrats can only be removed by unanimous votes of the other bureaucrats.

The current bureaucrats in the Guild Wars Wiki are:
 * User:Dirigible (zee.dirigible@gmail.com)
 * Term: July 1, 2007 – December 31, 2007
 * User:LordBiro (paul.boxley@gmail.com)
 * Term: August 1, 2007 – February 29, 2008
 * User:Xeeron (wiki@xeeron.de)
 * Term: September 1, 2007 - April 30, 2008

1 The current wiki configuration requires sysophood for some rights that bureaucrats should have. Until this is changed, accounts for bureaucrats should retain the sysop tag in the database purely as a technical workaround.

2 This paragraph is subject to change once one of the aforementioned policies comes into effect.