Hierarchy

Hierarchy is a simple tree of responsibility and reporting and obedience relationships. These are ethical relationships in that they are supposed to be conducted according to some set of rules or laws, i.e. ethical codes. That is not to say that all people in them always behave very ethically - that belief has various names including sysopism, fascism, racism.

Other power structures are possible, including:

• consensus decision making with trailing arguments gnawed off by a Lowest Troll
• assigning the faction that cares the most about an issue, to watchdog it
• bottom-up election of supervisors by workers, called the wobbly shop model

See w:power structure for proof that sysop power structure tends to sysopsism at Wikipedia, and why not to trust their view of this issue.