Wikipedia:Bureaucrats

This page is a summary of information about bureaucrats, policies and guidelines regarding the use of bureaucrat tools on the English Wikipedia, and details on how to perform certain actions. Changes made to it should reflect consensus.

Shortcuts WP:BUR WP:CRAT

Bureaucrats are Wikipedia users, usually administrators, with the technical ability to perform the following actions:

• Add the following user groups to a user account: administrator, bureaucrat, interface administrator, account creator, bot, copyright violation bot, confirmed user, and pending changes reviewer.^[1]
• Remove the following user groups from a user account: administrator, interface administrator, account creator, bot, copyright violation bot, IP block exempt, confirmed user, and pending changes reviewer.

Some of the above abilities overlap with administrators who are able to add and remove the IP block exempt, confirmed user, and pending changes user groups (in addition to certain other user groups).

Bureaucrats are bound by policy and consensus to only grant administrator or bureaucrat access when doing so reflects the wishes of the community, usually after a successful request at Wikipedia:Requests for adminship. In the same fashion, they are expected to exercise judgement in granting or removing bot flags with 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. Actions by bureaucrats are also bound by the policy on use of administrative rights.

Bureaucrats have been authorized by the community to remove administrator permissions in certain situations outlined below. Bureaucrats do not have the technical ability to remove bureaucrat rights from users or to grant or remove certain levels of access such as oversight or checkuser rights. These actions are performed by stewards, a multilingual group of individuals who serve all Wikimedia projects and are elected and reconfirmed annually by their users. Changes in user rights by stewards are recorded at meta:Special:Log/rights; for more information, see m:Steward requests/Permissions.

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. See Wikipedia:Requests for bureaucratship.

The bureaucrat privilege may also be removed by Steward request in certain situations (including if an account appears to be compromised).

On the English Wikipedia, there are currently 15 bureaucrats.