`  == to retain or not to retain ==  This debate can be split into multiple portions, addressing the individual castes in question, or can be a free-for-all.    #  Should the number of arbcom seats be allocated based on some kind of census?  twelve arbs for 30k active editors means the ratio is 2500-to-1 or thereabouts... which helps explain why arbcom insta-declines almost every case.  maybe we need a circuit court system, or a grand jury process?   #  Should wikipedia retain the existing ~630 active admins, each performing at least 15+edits/mo?  cf Kudpung's oft-mentioned anti-admin-cabal, and WeirSpiegelChequier's data on steady downward RfA trend since 2010  #  Should wikipedia retain the existing ~800 less-active admins, each performing fewer than 15+edits/mo?  cf perennial call for re-RfA-election every two years, plus recent auto-desysop-if-you-go-dormant-for-a-year rulz  #  Should wikipedia strive to re-acquire former admins (count unknown) who have been retired/banned/dormantAndDesysop'd?  cf Dennis Brown, founder of WP:RETENTION, and the morning277 slash wiki-PR troubles  #  Should wikipedia strive to increase the raw number of admins, from 30k-to-630 which is a ratio of 50 active editors per admin, to something like 6000 admins aka 5-to-1 ratio?  cf ``Adminship is No Big Deal``  #  If so, should the tools be split up, and specifically, how?  cf Eric Corbett, who asserts that splitting the tools is both easy and necessary, versus Kudpung, who says splitting the tools is inherently impossible to do   Most of the admin-related questions cannot be fully addressed, until we first get to the meat of the broader retention-question, about everyday editors.       Using the WMF definition, that 5+edits/mo defines an active editor, enWiki has been stuck at 35k-and-now-30k actives for years now... and that number is steadily falling.  The WMF knew this at least by summer 2010, and made it their top priority to fix the problem.  The result was:    VisualEditor!    -)           Meanwhile, the *readership* has not declined — quite the opposite!  The redacted redacted redacted folks that run things around here do not give out enough info to be sure, but from what I have been able to gather, enWiki has roughly 250M uniques per month, and growing.  That means, at least once a month, somebody looks up a fact on wikipedia.  Folks that look up *more* than on fact per month... such as looking up something every other day... and then staying to browse the articles a bit, plus maybe fix a typo they notice every other month or whatever... are prolly more common than the use-it-exactly-once-per-month crowd, by far.  But this is speculation, not hard data.  Further ``educated speculation`` says:  although we have 800 wikis, over 90% of the people that use those other wikis predominantly, *also* use enWiki as their fallback, when the local wiki does not have enough info.  Total people that use all wikis at least once a month:  500M, and growing, prolly will hit a billion within a couple years.  enWiki is the big goose that lays all the golden eggs; the others are not chicken-feed, but they are not the alpha rooster, in the wiki-wolfpack pecking order; to completely chicken out on further mixing metaphors, I'll stop now.       Hard facts:  we have 1 arb for every 50 admins, we have 1 admin for every 50 editors, and we have 1 editor for every 50 potential-editors-we-ought-to-have.  There are hundreds of millions of readers, and surely at least one percent of those people are smart enough (pillar one), neutral enough (pillar two), freedom-loving enough (pillar three), and nice enough (pillar four) to help improve wikipedia.  Every month, there are literally one thousand new folks that *try* to become editors... and 1050 that retire.  The wikiCulture of template-spam-rules and holier-than-thou-bureacracy and reversion-is-not-really-a-slap-in-the-face-ninjas is what drives people away, no question about it.      Even harder facts:  this wikiCulture is not happening by mistake.  Many wikipedians strongly believe that everything is just peachy, as far as driving people away is concerned.  They want everything added to be referenced immediately, and they want the references to be properly formatted, also immediately.  They want everybody to be an adult over thirty.  They want wikipedia to be a graduate-university website, with all editors having masters-or-equiv.  They want to get rid of all the POV-pushers from the other side who are ruining wikipedia (I've seen this in at least four vastly different topic-areas).  They want the tools to be difficult to use because it will help drive away the incompetents.  They want everybody to be of a certainly political slash cultural bent.  They want the template-spams to be harsh because it will help drive away the weaker-willed visigoths.  They want mastery of colloquial English to be a prereq, not just for mainspace copy, but for talkpages.  They want to get rid of useless anons aka vandals that have yet to reveal their true colors.  They want  Chuck Norris to live ten thousand years, and when Bruce Lee grabbed his chest-hair, that was TOTALLY no fair.  These are individual reasons for driving *certain* kinds of people away... and most of the individuals are strongly in favor of retaining 99% of existing editors, and at least somewhat in favor of adding new good eggs to the editor-pool.  But collectively, they all want to drive *somebody* away, for some reason which is *never* failure to comply with the five pillars, but Something Else... and collectively, each of them acting to drive away the small group they want gone from the wikiverse, the end result is downward-trending-net-active-editor-counts.  Unsurprising, really.       I think the consequences of not improving net-retention-of-active-editors are extremely dire.  Readership continues to increase.  Right now, we have somewhere between 5k and 10k readers *per* active editor.  There are not enough active editors to defend against blatant COI editors (not you PrincessK or Clover... we like you... but there *are* blatant ones out there), PR firms, spammers, visigoths, and so on.   All these groups will grow, as the readership grows.  Defending against them requires that we violate our core principle, the encyclopedia that anyone can edit... or alternatively, that we dramatically grow our active-editor-count, from 30k to 300k, and then from 300k to 3M.  Instead of one fiddleFaddle protecting wikipedia, and adding content, what if there were 100 Tim-like-humanoids, helping?  Some call me...  Tim.         Now, obviously the problem of growing from 30k to 300k needs to be solved.  And just picking 270k newbies at random is not good enough... the average netizen is not good enough to be a wikipedian, who abides by the five pillars.  We need folks from the top 10% of netizens, the cream of the crop.  But that should be no problem: there are plenty of folks, who are amongst our hundreds of millions of uniques, that are good enough.  These folks I call the Good Eggs, and when I talk about growing the editor-count, I am always specifically (albeit sometimes implicitly) talking about growing the editor-count by recruiting and retaining Good Eggs (only and exclusively).  There are plenty of Good Eggs already here; the vast majority of the 30k folks we have are Good Eggs, and the vast majority of the 630 admins we have are Good Eggs, although the percentage of deletionists is a bit too high methinks (that characteristic is not related to whether one is a Good Egg or not... there are Bad Egg deletionists and Good Egg deletionists and Bad Egg inclusionists and Good Egg inclusionists... the Good Egg criteria refers to morality/mindset/similar as defined by the five pillars and not much more than that).        But there is a question that needs to be settled first, before we talk about specific *ways* to try and grow the number of Good Eggs, whilst simultaneously keeping out the Bad Eggs of various sorts during the growth-period.  Namely:  is net retention good for wikipedia?  I argue that it is, as long as we retain largely Good Eggs.  Perhaps you will argue that sorting Good Eggs from the Bad Eggs is too hard?  Or perhaps you will argue that too many Good Eggs will overburden wikipedia's servers or social system or whatever, and cause unintended side-effects which result in more harm than good?  Or possibly, something completely different™ will be the basis of your argument.  I'm curious to see what you think ought to be done, and very curious, if you should disagree that striving for net-increase-in-retention (of Good Eggs) is indubitably a good thing, what reasons you will give.  Feel free to reply briefly, or at length.`