to retain or not to retain   This debate can be split into multiple portions addressing the individual castes in question or can be a freeforall      Should the number of arbcom seats be allocated based on some kind of census  twelve arbs for k active editors means the ratio is to or thereabouts which helps explain why arbcom instadeclines almost every case  maybe we need a circuit court system or a grand jury process     Should wikipedia retain the existing  active admins each performing at least editsmo  cf Kudpungs oftmentioned antiadmincabal and WeirSpiegelChequiers data on steady downward RfA trend since     Should wikipedia retain the existing  lessactive admins each performing fewer than editsmo  cf perennial call for reRfAelection every two years plus recent autodesysopifyougodormantforayear rulz    Should wikipedia strive to reacquire former admins count unknown who have been retiredbanneddormantAndDesysopd  cf Dennis Brown founder of WPRETENTION and the morning slash wikiPR troubles    Should wikipedia strive to increase the raw number of admins from kto which is a ratio of  active editors per admin to something like  admins aka to 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 adminrelated questions cannot be fully addressed until we first get to the meat of the broader retentionquestion about everyday editors       Using the WMF definition that editsmo defines an active editor enWiki has been stuck at kandnowk actives for years now and that number is steadily falling  The WMF knew this at least by summer  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 M 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 useitexactlyoncepermonth crowd by far  But this is speculation not hard data  Further educated speculation says  although we have  wikis over  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  M 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 chickenfeed but they are not the alpha rooster in the wikiwolfpack pecking order to completely chicken out on further mixing metaphors Ill stop now       Hard facts  we have  arb for every  admins we have  admin for every  editors and we have  editor for every  potentialeditorsweoughttohave  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 freedomloving 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  that retire  The wikiCulture of templatespamrules and holierthanthoubureacracy and reversionisnotreallyaslapinthefaceninjas 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 graduateuniversity website with all editors having mastersorequiv  They want to get rid of all the POVpushers from the other side who are ruining wikipedia Ive seen this in at least four vastly different topicareas  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 templatespams to be harsh because it will help drive away the weakerwilled 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 chesthair 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  of existing editors and at least somewhat in favor of adding new good eggs to the editorpool  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 downwardtrendingnetactiveeditorcounts  Unsurprising really       I think the consequences of not improving netretentionofactiveeditors are extremely dire  Readership continues to increase  Right now we have somewhere between k and k 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 activeeditorcount from k to k and then from k to M  Instead of one fiddleFaddle protecting wikipedia and adding content what if there were  Timlikehumanoids helping  Some call me  Tim         Now obviously the problem of growing from k to k needs to be solved  And just picking k 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  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 editorcount I am always specifically albeit sometimes implicitly talking about growing the editorcount by recruiting and retaining Good Eggs only and exclusively  There are plenty of Good Eggs already here the vast majority of the k folks we have are Good Eggs and the vast majority of the  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 moralitymindsetsimilar 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 growthperiod  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 wikipedias servers or social system or whatever and cause unintended sideeffects which result in more harm than good  Or possibly something completely different will be the basis of your argument  Im curious to see what you think ought to be done and very curious if you should disagree that striving for netincreaseinretention of Good Eggs is indubitably a good thing what reasons you will give  Feel free to reply briefly or at length