How is administrator attrition being addressed?
Hans Adler said "They are much less likely to ignore the outcome of previous discussions, simply because they know about them."
That's a good point: you need to have a lot of time to follow Wikipedia's discussions. My view is that we should not address that by requiring editors to dedicate a lot of time to the project, but just the opposite: we should have less discussions and new policies. Policies and guideline are not made for the sack of making them, they exist to guide editors, if regular editors are not able to read and understand all the policies they need to edit, them there's a problem there.
Yes, we need a strategy to reduce the policies. For many, Wikipedia is a huge Nomic game. And it's almost impossible to remove cruft from policies. While an attempt is going on to clean up the Manual of Style of the English Wikipedia, someone pushed through an addition to the effect that there should be no spaces before ordinary punctuation characters. There is a lot of pressure on the policies and guidelines because people come up with eccentric ideas, and then insist that if it's not literally decided by a guideline it's a matter of style or a content dispute.
Sometimes I think we should simply delete all policies, guidelines and essays and re-start the project with all the current content, all the experienced users and admins, but with a blank project space. It seems to be the only way to get rid of all the cruft that has accumulated, because every last bit is venerated by a few people who will fight to death to protect it, no matter how meaningless, redundant or ambiguous it is.