Dirk Rehile, the director of WkiSym 2006, conducted an interview with three leading Wikipedia practitioners, Angela Beesley, Elisabeth Bauer, and Kizu Naoko. In How and Why Wikipedia Works Beesley, Bauer and Naoko discuss how their involvement in Wikipedia grew over the years, as well as why the three believe its success will continue.

Naoko explains the editorial structure of Japanese Wikipedia: "In addition to readers and editors, there are proofreaders and reviewers, on several layers: Stylists check that an article follows the Wikipedia Manual of Style [12], others check the legitimacy of an article: that the contents is sound, that no copyright is violated, that nothing libelous is said, and other concerns. Most major Wikipedias have a system of informal reviews and validation in the form of 'Featured Article' or 'Peer Review'. It is not as strict as in academia, but it works reasonably well. Furthermore, there are image creators and image uploaders who basically harvest the web and the world for images that fall into the public domain and can be used on Wikipedia. And last but not least, there are translators, who translate articles from one Wikipedia to another.

"Then there are maintainers and administrators. Some prefer to call maintainers janitors or gardeners. Angela [Beesley] already mentioned some of the work they do, like fighting vandalism. Some maintainers handle results from community discussions, like consensus gained in the deletion request process for an article. For some of these tasks, you need to be a sysop. As for administration, while in principle everyone can initiate a new policy creation process, it is usually just a small number of people who actually do this and draft new policies. I think we are still determining some of these 'legislative' roles. Some of these roles are formally defined, many of them are informal..."

(via CyberJournalist.net)