Caretaker

A caretaker works quietly and patiently to make a large public wiki better. They do not engage in "enforcement", "policy debate", or personality issues unless literally forced to, e.g. by usurper behaviour and lack of courage facing it down. An enraged caretaker is usually a relatively formidable opponent, and often recruits many thoughtful others who object to the usurpation. By fighting it, they seek to prevent a bad copy problem or self-interested fork problem that would result if "the original" were to be usurped completely by a faction or social club whose goals are not those of the majority of contributors - projects so usurped become enemy projects if their values and technology and culture can't be kept away from essential projects whose integrity that the caretaker wants to protect.

For instance, the following are caretakers of the Wikipedia project and often defy the GodKing and other usurpers to try to keep it "on track" as an encyclopedia:

Note: many of these users have left in disgust at the ruling Wikipedia clique, or been attacked by sysop vandalism and even developer usurpation of the powers of sysops, probably out of the entirely rational fear that some sysops agree with the caretakers more than the GodKing.

There are also observers such as w:User:Chris Roy and w:User:MyRedDice who seek to gain some power by "studying" the interaction between caretakers and the usurpers.