2009/2/3 Farkas, Illes illes.farkas@gmail.com:
Dear All, Please, tell me, if other lists would be more appropriate for the following question. Thanks.
wikipedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org would be a better list, but I'll try and answer here.
We do non-profit research at a university and our goal is to learn more about how Wikipedia can produce high quality. So far we have used mainly the dump files from the Wikimedia download site.
Does anyone happen to know whether the hierarchy of Wikipedia users is public? And maybe the same for the employees of the Wikimedia Foundation?
Wikipedia doesn't really have a hierarchy, most things are done by consensus (at least, the actually writing of articles is, some of the behind the scenes stuff is done by votes). There are certain people with access to restricted tools (for deleting articles, for example), for information about that (for the English Wikipedia, at least, other languages may be slightly different but the basic idea is the same) see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:User_access_levels
The Wikimedia Foundation staff and hierarchy are described here: http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Staff