Eighteen months ago, we had 40 candidates in the Trope Workshop. In order to reduce that number, we instituted a rule that no one person could have more than three trope candidates in the Trope Workshop at a time. We grandfathered in the existing trope candidates.
Unfortunately, it appears that some people (no names) have chosen to interpret "a trope was just launched" as "a trope was just launched, so now I can propose a new trope candidate". Thus, while we quickly dropped from 40 trope candidates to 30, we have been sitting close to 30 candidates ever since then.
In order to make another attempt to reduce the number of trope candidates, we instituted a rule that any trope candidate that was untouched (other than minor housekeeping edits) for six months would be summarily deleted. This was taken as "a trope candidate was deleted, so now I can propose a new trope candidate".
It looks like we need to be more strict in order to clear the backlog.
I am thus proposing that we limit the Trope Workshop to fifteen candidates total, with no grandfathering.
As to which fifteen get to remain in the Workshop... the ten that we inherited from TV Tropes cannot be returned to their proposers', so they have to stay. I'll have RANDOM.org put the list of the other eighteen trope candidates into a true random order, keep the first five in the Trope Workshop, and move the other thirteen to their proposers' sandboxes -- this gives a candidate proposed by the newest Troper and a candidate proposed by a founding admin exactly the same chance to remain in the Workshop. As we launch (or reject) tropes, I will pull candidates out of the sandboxes in the same order that they appear on the random-order list -- which will be posted here in its own thread for transparency -- in order to bring the count back to fifteen. Trope candidates that are currently in sandboxes will be added to the end of the list in random order. After that, it's "first in, first out": brand-new candidates that do not currently exist on the wiki will be added to the end of the list as trope proposers bring their candidates' sandbox pages to my attention.
(I am aware of approximately two dozen tropes that a founding admin wants to write, but has not started work on. He has not created sandbox pages for these ideas, so they do not get to be added to the list here.)
If we finally get to the point where the waiting list is empty and there are fewer than fifteen candidates in the Trope Workshop, then trope candidates will be allowed to be submitted directly to the Trope Workshop until there are fifteen candidates in the Workshop again. Whenever the Workshop has fifteen candidates, the list will be in effect.
Pinging the usual folks that I ping, and anyone with a current trope candidate, for comments: @Agiletek @Bauerbach @GentlemensDame883 @Goo Monster @HeneryVII @Jlaw @Kuma @Lequinni @RivetVermin @Umbire the Phantom @Utini501 @Labster @Looney Toons @GethN7 @Robkelk @QuestionableSanity @Derivative @SelfCloak