> What experience (or event) did you derive this from?
In the very beginning of the project, we brought many editors and let most of them into what we now call administrative positions. They did not necessarily have access to accounts and other sensitive info, but they could make decisions to guide ProleWiki. Note that this was before I became an admin, but what we found out was that everyone had their own idea of what PW should be and ultimately, we spent more time debating than actually doing anything. Most of those editors eventually left the project due to a lack of interest (if I remember correctly) and we had to rebuild a new structure.
> Why would a democratic centralist structure not work in small numbers?
In our opinion (Forte and me), it was more efficient for the project to have executive power remain between the administrators considering the age, numbers, goals and general context of our project.
For example, we were and are still wary of potential trolls or wreckers joining -- this is a problem with all online projects.
Derived from my own experience as a moderator in the past, I generally don't want to give too much power to users because you never truly know you who are dealing with (see for example Wisconcom). Also, I've noticed people don't really care about what goes on behind the scenes as long as the website (any website) works and they're given enough liberty on it. I think this makes sense because it's not really their lives or livelihood at stake, it's just a website.
Certainly though editors are allowed to propose changes and for a while now we've made them more involved in administrative processes. Changes on our principles for example are voted on (and proposed) by the editors and so are most new account requests. This is mostly done on the Discord though as Wikimedia is terrible for this kind of discussion, so we might actually make that clearer to new editors that they should join the discord.
> How many (active) users are on Prolewiki?
There is a page here: https://en.prolewiki.org/wiki/Special:ActiveUsers that shows Active Users based on at least 1 action in the last 30 days.
Generally I would say we are about 10 active editors, i.e. editors that edit every day or every 2 days. We've recently accepted 5 new editors too.
> Is there a system of thought that corresponds to when users don't need to agree with certain principles?
There's not any outlined process at this time. We evaluate their answers in the account request and might ask them more since they give their email. We generally look that they agree to our principles (which is a question), but sometimes it's difficult because they might say they agree to our principles, and then in later answers show they clearly do not.
100% (personal) agreement to the principles is not required, however PW pushes a certain line (ML) and so even if an editor does not agree with something, we ask that they at least contribute as if they agree to it. E.g. if an editor disagrees that China is socialist (contrary to our principle that China is AES), we might let them in, but look that they don't start reworking the whole page to remove mentions of socialism on the PRC.
I think generally we want to see maturity from our editors, in the case they don't entirely agree with the principles, i.e. that they understand why ProleWiki is the way it is and they don't try to go against it sneakily or push their own opinions in our articles like trots, lol.
Hope this answers your questions.