Administrator

Administrators, commonly known as admins and also called sysops (system operators), are Wikipedia editors who have been entrusted access to restricted technical features ("tools") which help with maintenance. For example, administrators can protect and delete pages, block other editors, and undo these actions as well. (For a more complete list, see Wikipedia:Administrators/Tools.)

In the very early days, all users functioned as administrators, and in principle they still should. From early on, it has been pointed out that administrators should never develop into a special subgroup of the community but should be a part of the community like anyone else. Generally, the maintenance and administration of Wikipedia can be conducted by anyone, without the specific technical functions granted to administrators.

One important caveat is that an administrator who has interacted with a user or article in an administrative role (i.e., in order to address a dispute, problematic conduct, administrative assistance, outside advice/opinion, enforce a policy, and the like) or whose actions on an article are minor, obvious, and do not speak to bias, is usually not prevented from acting on the article, user, or dispute.

This is because one of the roles of administrators is precisely to deal with such matters and if necessary, continue dealing with them. That said, an administrator may still wish to pass such a matter to another administrator as "best practice" in some cases (although not required to). Or, they may wish to be absolutely sure that no concerns will "stick", in certain exceptional cases.