Wikipedia:Leadership opportunities

There are many leadership opportunities for experienced Wikipedians. While it is not strictly necessary to be an administrator to become involved in these leadership areas, either adminship or an equivalent level of experience and trust is required in most cases.

Note: Some areas listed are fully staffed and are not accepting volunteers at this time.

Activity Duties How to volunteer
Featured Article Director Coordination of the featured article process, reviewing and closing votes, placing articles on the main page Contact current featured article director
Bureaucrats Review and close adminship votes, act on requests to change usernames, act on decisions regarding the granting of bot flags Obtain consensus at the requests for bureaucratship section of WP:RFA
Arbitration Committee clerks Housekeeping of arbitration pages, counting votes Contact the arbitration committee to volunteer
Checkuser clerks (Obsolete) Assist in formatting and organization of checkuser requests and outcomes See Wikipedia:Requests for checkuser/Clerks
IRC channel operators Add and remove authorized users, remove disruptive users from channels Contact existing channel operators
Mediation committee Provide formal mediation of disputes Submit a nomination to the mediation committee
Arbitration committee Binding dispute resolution Elections held annually
Meta Many activities including sister project coordination, translation, management of the spam blacklist, and cross-project requests for access. Meta is a separate wiki with its own administrators. Start out by editing
Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees Responsible for financial and legal management of Wikipedia's parent corporation Periodic elections and appointments
Sister projects Projects such as commons, WikiBooks, and WikiNews also seek volunteers. Each is a separate wiki with its own administrators. Anyone can edit; see each project for its own leadership opportunities
Mailing list administration Dealing with spam, reading the moderation queue, dealing with bouncing addresses, dealing with problem posters. Each list has its own administrator. Contact existing list administrators
OTRS volunteers Responding to email sent to the Wikimedia Foundation, including complaints about copyright problems and article quality. See m:OTRS/Info-en recruiting
Stewards Fulfill access requests other than routine grants of adminship. Most of these involve smaller projects. Annual elections
m:Wikimedia chapters Varying membership and leadership posts by country Varies among chapters
WMF Board committees and subcommittees