Bharatpedia:Administration

This is an information page.

It documents a Bharatpedia process, convention, or practice. It is not one of Bharatpedia's policies or guidelines, and its contents are advisory rather than mandatory. Editors should use common sense when applying it.

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Bharatpedia requires a certain amount of administration and governance in order to further the project's goals. To achieve Bharatpedia's purpose, a wide range of administrative pages are made available in various namespaces which enumerate the various protocols and conventions created and implemented by community consensus for English Bharatpedia.

This process is not generally automated, and live human administration is necessary to ensure that the editing of project pages, whether administration pages or content pages, happens peacefully and in accordance with the policies generally governing the creation and editing of all Bharatpedia pages.

This page is an information page. It is not one of Bharatpedia's policies or guidelines; rather, its purpose is to explain certain aspects of Bharatpedia's norms or practices. It may reflect varying levels of consensus.

Human and legal administration

At the top of the human and legal administrative structure is the Bharatmedia Foundation, a not-for-profit and charitable organization governed by a Board of Trustees. Although the Bharatmedia Foundation owns Bharatpedia, it is largely uninvolved in the creation of Bharatpedia's policies and daily implementation of those policies.

The Bharatpedia community is generally self-organizing and self-governing, as editors with varying administrative abilities and their elected project administrators are granted considerable discretion over the means used to accomplish Bharatpedia's purpose.

Editors are entrusted with the responsibility of upholding the integrity of Bharatpedia while adhering to intellectual property rights, such as avoiding plagiarism, respecting copyright laws, and presenting appropriate citations for article content.

Pursuant to the Five Pillars, English Bharatpedia does not occur according to firm rules. Bharatpedia's protocols are principles, not a civil code or exacting law, and are actualized using common sense and editor discretion.

Bharatpedia's policies, guidelines, and formatting norms are created and revised by the editing community to describe best practices and clarify doctrine aimed at improving the encyclopedia and resolving disputes. These "official" protocols and conventions require discussion and a high level of community-wide consensus for promotion to a guideline or policy, thus have a significant degree of influence during deliberations.

Most processes on Bharatpedia depend on editor consensus in some form or another, governed by Bharatpedia's content and conduct policies. While consensus is the key method for making decisions, a consensus amongst a small group of editors cannot override community-wide policies such as Neutral point of view. In order to determine community consensus and resolve ongoing disputes, a wide array of discussion venues are made available covering topic-specific issues editors encounter in writing and maintaining Bharatpedia.

Ensuring the harmonious implementation of the project's editor consensus-developed protocols governing the creation and development of all types of pages are editors elected or appointed to certain roles: functionaries like stewards and the Arbitration Committee, alongside bureaucrats and administrators, all of whom ultimately derive their own authority from the Bharatmedia Foundation.

Bharatmedia Foundation

The Bharatmedia Foundation owns and operates Bharatpedia, along with several other collaborative, wiki-based Internet projects. The Foundation organizes the raising of money, distributes grants, develops software, deploys that software, controls the servers, and does outreach to support Bharatpedia projects. The Foundation does not edit Bharatpedia content (except for occasional office actions). Bharatpedia editors handle content and internal policies. The Foundation is governed and guided by the terms of its charter, corporate bylaws, mission statement, and vision.

The global work of the Foundation is supported by local chapters, and each is governed by its own chapter board of trustees. Trustees of Bharatmedia affiliates are assisted by a very small number of staff.

Editors

Editors, often referred to as Bharatpedians, are the individuals who compose the community of volunteers that write and edit the pages of Bharatpedia, as opposed to readers, who simply read the articles. Some editors use their real-life names as user names to identify themselves on Bharatpedia, whereas others choose never to reveal personal information.

Theoretically all editors are equal with no "power structure" or "law enforcement officers". There are, however, within the editing community, editors with extra privileges (maintenance responsibilities or ability to perform certain administrative actions).

To locate your user access levels, go to Special:Preferences. In the "user profile" tab is "Member of groups". User access levels (or user rights and groups) are determined by whether an editor is logged into an account, whether the account is of sufficient age or by number of constructive edits based on knowledge of Bharatpedia protocols.

Some user levels are granted automatically; for example, an autoconfirmed user is an account that is more than four days old and has made at least 10 edits. Other user rights are only given upon request, such as rollbacker, page mover or template editor.

Entry into user groups such as administrator and bureaucrat are determined by community discussion and consensus. Oversight and CheckUser rights are only granted by the Arbitration Committee, and only after strict scrutiny. The system-generated user rights are listed at Special:ListGroupRights.

Stewardship

Stewards are volunteer editors with complete access to the wiki interface on all Bharatpedia wikis, including the ability to change any and all user rights and groups. They are tasked with technical implementation of community consensus, dealing with emergencies, and intervening against cross-wiki vandalism. The number of stewards is not limited by any policies. Stewards are elected annually by the global Bharatpedia community. Candidates must have a support/oppose ratio of at least 80% with at least 30 supporting users. Current stewards are confirmed during each election. Stewards are subject to the stewards' policy.

The Bharatmedia Foundation created the position of steward when it recognized the need to separate user rights management from software development and systems administration.

Arbitration Committee

Members of the Arbitration Committee (referred to as ArbCom or Arbs), are volunteer editors who act in concert or in sub-groups imposing binding solutions on conduct disputes the community has been unable to resolve. ArbCom has very wide latitude in adjudication with the authority to impose general sanctions and/or personal sanctions on editors or groups of editors. They impose sanctions, either as a result of remedies accepted during cases, or during requests for clarification or amendment, or as a result of motions. The arbitration process exists exclusively for Bharatpedia conduct disputes (i.e., not content disputes that may require mediation). The committee also resolves issues by private hearings if factors such as privacy may preclude public consideration. Arbitrators are elected annually in one-year or overlapping two-year terms. The original Committee was appointed by the founder in December 2003 from a group of volunteers.

Bureaucrats

Bureaucrats are volunteer editors with the technical ability (user rights) to:

• promote other users to administrator or bureaucrat status;
• remove the admin status of other users;
• grant and revoke an account's bot status.

They are bound by policy and consensus to grant administrator or bureaucrat access only when doing so reflects the wishes of the community, usually after a successful request at Bharatpedia:Requests for adminship. In like fashion, they are expected to exercise judgement in granting or removing bot flags on the advice of the Bot Approvals Group. They are expected to be capable judges of consensus, and are expected to explain the reasoning for their actions on request and in a civil manner.

Users are granted bureaucrat status by community consensus. The process is similar to the process of granting administrator status, but the expectations for potential bureaucrats are higher and community consensus must be clearer. Bureaucrats do not have the technical ability to grant other levels of access (they cannot assign oversight or checkuser rights). These actions are performed by stewards, a small multilingual group that serves all Bharatpedia projects. Additional stewards are elected annually.

The English Bharatpedia currently has 2 bureaucrats.

Administrators

Administrators, commonly known as admins or sysops (system operators), are volunteer editors who have been trusted with access to restricted technical features ("tools"). For example, administrators can protect and delete pages, and block other editors. Administrators are appointed after a successful community review process at requests for adminship in which consensus is determined by the bureaucrats, or following an administrator election.

The English Bharatpedia currently has 5 administrators.

Administrators assume responsibilities as volunteers; thus they are never required to use their tools, and must never use them to gain an advantage in a dispute in which they are involved. Only the Arbitration Committee or community consensus following an administrator recall may authorize the removal of administrator privileges, and this authorization may be executed by any bureaucrat or steward.

Administrators are not granted more editorial control over article content than other editors. They are required to follow all policies and guidelines and are held to the same level of accountability as non-administrators. The tools cover processes such as page deletion, page protection, blocking and unblocking users, and the ability to edit fully protected pages. Administrators also have the ability to grant and remove most access rights to other users.

By convention, administrators also normally take responsibility for judging the outcome of certain discussions requiring these technical controls (such as deletions).

Other roles

Additional roles within the Bharatpedia community include:

• New page reviewers — editors who mark pages created by others as patrolled or reviewed.
• Rollbackers — editors who may revert consecutive revisions of an editor using the rollback feature.
• Pending changes reviewers — editors who can review other users' edits to articles placed under pending changes protection.
• File movers — editors experienced in working with files who can rename them.
• Page movers — editors who have demonstrated a good understanding of Bharatpedia's page naming system.

Data structure and development

Development of the Bharatpedia data structure occurs within various namespaces. Namespaces allow for the organization and separation of content pages from administration pages. Each namespace also segregates and organizes data according to its function within the overall project schema (articles, portals, files, drafts, templates etc.). Namespaces separate data into core sets, those intended for public viewing, and those intended for the editing community.

Unlike the Article namespace and other content-related namespaces, such as the Portal namespace, administrative namespaces are used to assist the building of content and should be seen to be mutually exclusive of content pages, except for cases where a linkage is required. In other words, administration pages should be in the background and not visible to the reader.

Namespaces

Bharatpedia has 30 namespaces, each with an associated talk namespace. The namespaces are numbered, with the main namespace being zero. All namespaces except the main namespace use a prefix; for example, all user pages are prefixed by User:, and help pages by the prefix Help:.

Some namespaces also have abbreviated identifiers, for example typing WT: is a shortcut redirect for the "Bharatpedia talk" namespace and H: for the "Help" namespace. By default Bharatpedia's search engine is restricted to the Article namespace. However, typing a namespace "name" (prefix) followed by a colon limits search results to that namespace. Namespace prefixes should not be confused with prefixes for interwiki linking.

Each namespace is given a numerical value – intended for hiding pages on a watchlist.

Content namespaces

Content namespaces are intended for use by readers as part of the encyclopedia, such as articles.

Article namespace

The Main namespace or Article namespace is the namespace of Bharatpedia that contains the encyclopedia proper—that is, where content—Bharatpedia articles—reside. The main namespace is the default namespace and does not use a prefix in article page names. This is distinct from other namespaces where page names are always prefixed by an indicator of the particular namespace in which the page resides. Thus, any page created without such a prefix will automatically be placed in the article namespace. The Main namespace number is zero (0).

Portal namespace

The Portal namespace is intended to serve as "main pages" for content (articles) to specific topics or areas. The idea of a portal is to help readers and/or editors navigate their way through Bharatpedia topic areas through pages similar to the Main Page. In essence, portals such as the Contents portal are useful entry-points to Bharatpedia's content. Portals may be associated with WikiProjects; however, unlike WikiProjects, portals are meant for both readers and editors of Bharatpedia, and should promote content and its navigation. A portal link box may be added to a page by typing .

Administrative namespaces

Administrative namespaces are used to organize and manage the project. These include:

• User namespace — pages for individual editors.
• Bharatpedia namespace — project-space pages such as policies, guidelines, information pages, and essays.
• File namespace — for images, audio, and other media files.
• MediaWiki namespace — for interface messages.
• Template namespace — for templates that are transcluded into other pages.
• Help namespace — for help and documentation pages.
• Category namespace — for categories that group pages by subject or status.
• Draft namespace — for draft articles awaiting review.
• Module namespace — for Lua modules.

Maintenance pages, talk pages and interactive forums fall completely within the bounds of administration, as distinguished from content. In this regard, categories are utilized for both content and administration but should not have both types of pages within the same category. Templates are also used for both content and administration pages and therefore, unlike other administrative pages, are collected together and entirely as sub-categories of Category:Bharatpedia templates.

Policies and guidelines

Bharatpedia's policies and guidelines are developed by the community to describe best practice, clarify principles, resolve conflicts, and otherwise further the project's goals. There is no designated legislative body; policies and guidelines are created and amended through consensus.

There are three principal core content policies: neutral point of view, verifiability, and no original research. Together with the copyright policy, these determine the type and quality of material that is acceptable in Bharatpedia articles. The principles upon which these policies are based cannot be superseded by other policies or guidelines, nor by editor consensus.

Discussion venues

Bharatpedia has a wide range of noticeboards and discussion venues where editors can raise matters requiring attention. These include:

• Village pump — for general discussion of Bharatpedia matters.
• Administrators' noticeboard — for matters requiring administrator attention.
• Requests for comment — for soliciting broader community input on a specific issue.
• Centralized discussion — a directory of ongoing discussions of broad interest.
• Reference desk — for general-knowledge questions.
• Help desk — for questions about using Bharatpedia.
• Teahouse — a friendly place for new editors.

Dispute resolution

Dispute resolution is the process of resolving disagreements between editors. It applies to content disputes, conduct disputes, and disagreements about policies and guidelines. The guiding principle is that disputes should be resolved as early and as informally as possible.

The stages of dispute resolution are:

1. Direct discussion — the first step is always to discuss the matter with the other editors involved.
2. Outside input — if direct discussion fails, editors may seek input through third opinion, requests for comment, or a specialised noticeboard.
3. Administrative intervention — for conduct issues such as vandalism, edit warring, and personal attacks, the administrators' noticeboard is the appropriate venue.
4. Arbitration — for the most serious and intractable disputes, arbitration is available. Arbitration is binding and is reserved for disputes that other processes have failed to resolve.

See also

• Bharatpedia:Administrators
• Bharatpedia:Bureaucrats
• Bharatpedia:Stewards
• Bharatpedia:Arbitration Committee
• Bharatpedia:User access levels
• Bharatpedia:List of policies
• Bharatpedia:List of guidelines
• Bharatpedia:Noticeboards
• Bharatpedia:Dispute resolution
• Bharatpedia:Bharatmedia Foundation
• Bharatpedia:Five pillars
• Bharatpedia:Consensus
• Bharatpedia:Namespace