User:TomStar81/Becoming an Administrator
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Wikipedia has a certain hierarchy[1] with regards to user rights. The bottom tier is comprised of anonymous editors (or "anons" for short), above these editors are the registered users, and then the comparatively small group of people who hold "additional rights". These additional rightsāso named owing to their technical origins, but widely considered across Wikipedia to be privileges rather than rightsāare bestowed upon veteran editors who are judged to be of good character and therefore trustworthy. While there are a number of different users on site who hold additional rights, the largest group is those with administrator privileges.
The main administrator rights allow users to delete, undelete, protect, and unprotect pages, as well as block registered accounts and anonymous editors making unproductive edits. This is accomplished through additional tabs at the top of the page that provide technical options for controlling and/or regulating content on site. At present, 859 active users[2] have been granted admin tools through the process known as Request for Adminship (or RFA for short), and that number grows albeit slowly as more users end up successfully clearing RFAs and join the administrative group.
Administrator privileges have been held by a number of editors from the Military history project, including our regular contributors and a number of our coordinators. Adminship is useful to our project because it allows our members to help ensure a calm and productive atmosphere by blocking vandal accounts, protecting pages involved in edit wars, and appropriately deleting articles judged by the community to be unneeded on the site.
If your goal is to obtain adminship rights on Wikipedia, this essay will serve to cover points of qualification and the adminship process, administrative powers and when they should be applied, along with other relevant information.