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Meet the 36 People Who Run Wikipedia
blastboy writes By pretty much any logic, Wikipedia shouldn't work: A vast website, built on the labor of volunteers, with very few tangible rewards and a fairly weird hierarchy. From the article: "The stewards would prefer to go unnoticed. Only one has ever had any real fame—Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales served as a steward from 2006 to 2009. They operate above the fray, giving and taking user privileges and intervening in matters that lower-ranking editors can’t handle. You can summon them for emergencies in the Wikimedia Stewards IRC chat room by typing '!steward.' Their secrecy has a certain irony, given the very public product they manage, but perhaps it’s emblematic of Wikimedia as a whole. When your foundational value is that 'every single human being can freely share in the sum of all knowledge,' hierarchies become a necessary evil."
And because nobody pays attention to the stewards, they're not held accountable.
To play devil's advocate: the fact that they're doing their jobs commendably well is possibly the reason nobody pays attention to them. So by that, they ARE held accountable. They just measure up pretty well under that accounting, so nobody complains about them (with the obvious notable exceptions).
It's kind of like saying "and because nobody pays attention to the janitors at my workplace, they're not held accountable." You'd better bet that if things started going missing or the mess started to build up, people would pay attention pretty quickly.
>"...your foundational value is that 'every single human being can freely share in the sum of all knowledge'"...
Hah. If I could only count the number of factually correct pages that have disappeared over the years for failure to be "relevant" or "sufficiently important" or whatever metric they use, I'd be counting pretty damn high. Care about a regionally famous indie band from the mid 90's to the point that you'll carefully assemble what little information is out there about them? Too bad, gone in a blink, as if archive.org were complete and searchable for that stuff.
I've just never understood why something true should be excluded there.