[TZubiri]

Correct, and Administrators (and users invoking administrators) will often selectively use rules to pursue editorial purposes.

I learned about wikipedia rules before learning about actual law, it's interesting to see exactly how the mechanisms of modern democracy protect against the specific ways in which Wikipedia fails:

1- Separation of powers between rulemakers and judges. In practice many Administrators who have the power to enforce rules and bans are actually editing articles themselves!

2- Ignore all rules, certainly crazy, it makes the rules an afterthought, it reminds me a bit of the Common Law focus on Case Law as opposed to Napoleonic Civil Law's focus on codified laws, but way stronger.

3- No or weak procedure. Imagine you are in a legal fight with another editor, and you say a bad word, woops, turns out that's a 2 day ban. Maybe there's a parallel with contempt of court? But what happens in wikipedia is that the whole edit war is lost on that technicality, Administrators don't rule in favour of one edit or the other, they distribute penalties to one part or the other and if one party is temp banned, they can't edit the article anymore and the article state the other party desires has a stability and consensus advantage. The only exception are protected articles, in which case administrators can emit an official ruling on what the article content should be.

[amiga386]

While Admins do have a lot of power, at the same time their power is checked by ArbCom. Admins are held to a higher standard than general users and are kicked out of the role and banned from reapplying if they're found to have abused their privileges (as well as being given topic bans or complete bans from editing).

Merely inactive admins are automatically deadminned, because if you don't need it, you don't get it.

There is also something analogous to the political world: users can petition for an administrator recall, if the issue is a rogue admin abusing their privileges, or even just the admin is trying to hold onto their privileges when it's clear to others that they don't actually need them: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WP:RECALL

So while I don't think Wikipedia is perfect, it does better than your summary implies.

[tux3]

>1- Separation of powers between rulemakers and judges. In practice many Administrators who have the power to enforce rules and bans are actually editing articles themselves!

Separation of judge and party is enforced pretty consistently, it is official policy that people shouldn't participate in a decision if they were involved in the kerfuffle in any way. You can edit articles and enforce rules, as long as these are separate. And then, rules can be proposed by anyone, but they're not just created on the fly because it's convenient. That would obviously be objectionable.

In fact this isn't limited to admins, regular users have the power to decide on a ban. An administrator is only needed to close and enact the decision, and this is what happened to Larry Sanger here.

>The only exception are protected articles, in which case administrators can emit an official ruling on what the article content should be.

Admins don't have a special power to decide what should be in important protected articles. It is not like a government where people are elected, and then citizens don't have any say until the next election.

The community tries to reach a consensus, and admins are part of the community. They get an input like everyone else plus special powers to enact decisions. But any "ruling" better reflect consensus, or you better bet you will wake up to the Noticeboards on fire with about 50,000 words of heated complaints and discussion.