Editing Wikipedia (section)

=== Administrators ===
{{Main|Wikipedia administrators}}
Editors in good standing in the community can request extra [[Wikipedia:User access levels|user rights]], granting them the technical ability to perform certain special actions. In particular, editors can choose to run for "[[administrators (Wikipedia)|adminship]]",<ref name="David_Mehegan" /> which includes the ability to delete pages or prevent them from being changed in cases of severe vandalism or editorial disputes.<ref name=":6" group="W">[[Wikipedia:Administrators]]</ref> Administrators are not supposed to enjoy any special privilege in decision-making; instead, their powers are mostly limited to making edits that have project-wide effects and thus are disallowed to ordinary editors, and to implement restrictions intended to prevent disruptive editors from making unproductive edits.<ref name=":6" group="W" />

By 2012, fewer editors were becoming administrators compared to Wikipedia's earlier years, in part because the process of vetting potential administrators had become more rigorous.<ref>{{cite web |url=https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/07/3-charts-that-show-how-wikipedia-is-running-out-of-admins/259829 |title=3 Charts That Show How Wikipedia Is Running Out of Admins |last=Meyer |first=Robinson |website=[[The Atlantic]] |date=July 16, 2012|access-date = September 2, 2012|archive-date = December 26, 2018|archive-url = https://web.archive.org/web/20181226132809/https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/07/3-charts-that-show-how-wikipedia-is-running-out-of-admins/259829%20|url-status = live}}</ref> In 2022, there was a particularly contentious request for adminship over the candidate's anti-Trump views; ultimately, they were granted adminship.<ref>{{cite web |last1=Harrison |first1=Stephen |date=June 16, 2022 |title=Inside Wikipedia's Historic, Fiercely Contested "Election" |url=https://slate.com/technology/2022/06/wikipedia-administrator-election-tamzin.html|access-date=July 22, 2022 |website=[[Slate (magazine)|Slate]]|archive-date=August 24, 2022|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20220824123521/https://slate.com/technology/2022/06/wikipedia-administrator-election-tamzin.html|url-status=live}}</ref>

Wikipedia has delegated some administrative functions to [[Intelligent agent|bots]], such as when granting privileges to human editors. Such [[Government by algorithm|algorithmic governance]] has an ease of implementation and scaling, though the automated rejection of edits may have contributed to a downturn in active Wikipedia editors.<ref name=":0" />