:::::::::Sorry, but the behaviour of the party engaging in baiting is very relevant to how TAP (wrongly) reacted to it. See recent arbcom rulings on baiting. Yes TAP has made a great many edits and spent a great many hours on Wikipedia, but he's clearly not spent most of them reading policy. 

 :::::::::That's why this very talk page has, in a separate thread, some more whining (or baiting?) from BWilkins about TAP using the wrong wiki-term for something or other - was it "promoting" instead of "granting", "supporting" instead of "agreeing", does it really matter? If it's the case that prolific content contributors can spend enough time reading policies to answer several dozen questions, in detail, adequately - in fact, TAP only gets tripped up on the exact same question as the most recent successful RfA candidate, oddly enough - but still haven't quite mastered every single last acronym and policy and "you may not email more than X people if you feel harrassed by only Y people", then, guess what, the editor numbers are going to continue declining. 

 :::::::::Become part of the solution, not part of the problem - go explain this to BWilkins, rather than assuming that the newbie is the easier one to pick on.