Leader: Difference between revisions

The leader may be an [[:Category:Active contributors to this wiki|active contributor]] and key member of the community of [[editor]]s, or be completely hands-off.

Wikimedia Foundation (WMF) leaders are usually members of both [[sysop]] and [[bureaucrat]] [[:Category:User group|user groups]], which means they usually hold highest user group rights in order to enforce their leadership if necessary.  Depending upon their level of wiki expertise, they may also be a member of the [[interwiki]] user group, or may even have created an additional [[:Category:User Bot|bot]] account.  But this is only one possibility of many.  High user group rights are no prerequisite for wiki leadership.

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

Today, excellent [[:Category:Wiki Engine|wiki engines]] are available for [[:Category:Free software|free]]; and using the resources of a web server, can easily be paid by [[:Category:Advertising|advertisement]].  Therefore, everybody can start their own wiki for free and without real technical expertise in a minute or two on [[:Category:WikiFarm|wiki farms]] such as [[:Category:Wikia|Wikia]] or [[:Category:Orain|Orain]].  There is hardly any threshold to take.  Therefore many wikis are '[[:Category:FoundedIn20xx|founded]]', and many are failing as well.  Our index is full of documents of [[:Category:GoalAbandoned|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 lodged a snapshot of such wiki before it died).  Good leadership is still rare.  And wikis are like living entities.  If folks turn their backs 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 ([[:Category:Spammed|spammed]] with links to illicit substances), crumble down or overthrow you.  It is not enough to label somebody a leader.  They also must actually be a leader, and do that work well and consistently.  Wikis are micro-entities within the potentially hostile environment of the 'Wild Wild Web' that can be [[spam]]med 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.