Editing Leader

The '''leader''' of a [[wiki]] is a {{tag|Wiki People|person}} who is the principal, senior [[administrator]] in charge of the site; either by means of [[Founder|founding]] the [[WhatIsWiki|wiki]], being asked to take over from the retiring founder, or adopting a [[:Category:Dormant|dormant]] and / or [[:Category:GoalAbandoned|abandoned]] wiki site.

The leader may be an [[:Category:Active contributors to this wiki|active contributor]] and key member of the community of editors; or, as in the case of [[WikiIndex]], may be retired <sup>[[John Stanton]] (founder, developer) and hands-off [[Ray King]] (founder, owner)</sup> and leave the day-to-day running to <sup>[[MarkDilley]] (founder)</sup> of the community.

== [[Special:ListGroupRights|User group rights]] ==
; WikiMedia wiki:
Wiki leaders are usually members of both [[sysop]] and [[Bureaucrat]] [[usergroup]]s, which means they usually hold highest user group rights in order to enforce their leadership if necessary. Depending upon their level of wiki expertise, may also be a member of the [[interwiki]] usergroup, or may even have created an additional [[:Category:User Bot|bot]] account if they tend towards micromanagement. This reflects the usual style of the society they stem from. But this is only one possibility out of many. High user group rights are no indispensable prerequisites for wiki leadership.

: [[WikiWikiWeb|Wiki]]:
Wiki are a community effort.  Flattening out the community - in their abilities to build the wiki - is an important aspect of the software of most early wiki.

== Number ==
The number of leaders of any wiki can vary. Necessarily there is only one leader on a [[:Category:Bliki|Bliki]] because it is a personal thing and not a collaboratory effort. Depending on the type of hierarchy and size of a wiki there can be need of several leaders. In case of a wiki about grassroots movements and grassroots democracy the hierarchy would be as flat as can be which makes every active member of such community a leader. This depends very much on the founder or group of founders and their approach. Either the focus lies on the wiki as a structure or on the [[Wiki People]] as a community.

==Leadership==
Today real good [[Wiki Engine]]s are available for free and using the resources of a web server can easily be paid by advertisement. Therefore everybody can start his own wiki for free and without real technical expertise in a minute or two on [[Wiki Farm]]s like [[Wikia]] or [[Orain]]. There is hardly any threshold to take. Therefore many wikis are 'founded' and many are failing as well. Our index is full of documents of failure and our [[:Category:Dormant]] is better populated than anybody could wish. The corpses of big and small wikis are laying side by side in the [[:Category:Dead]] and [[:Category:Archived]] (which means someone shot a snapshot of such wiki before it died). Good leadership is still rare. And wikis are like living entities. If You turn your back on them while they are young, they will die. And if you turn your back on them while they grow up, they will run away, [Fork], deviate, get depressed, become illegal, crumble down or overthrow you. It is not enough to label somebody a leader. They also must be a leader and do that work well and consistently. Wikis are micronations within the potentially hostile environment of the Wild Wild Web that can be SPAMed like a locust infestation or disturbed by [[Troll]]s. Therefore the work of a leader is not less complex only because a wiki is small, rather the opposite.

;See also
*[[Template:Founded by]]
*[[Check user]]

[[Category:Wiki People| ]]
[[Category:WikiIdea]]
[[Category:Glossary]]