If you don't consider it as a trade-off then bad
things happen, you can
lose
the most productive members.
Good propaganda, and it worked, but our most productive members are not
habitually nasty, only a few are.
Other areas might be things like policies, there very
much are areas
where people are deliberately writing the policies differently in
different parts so that they can delete things they don't like, even
though the policies, on the whole, probably don't permit them to do
that; if you write something into the corner of a policy somewhere and
then edit war that to stick with a group, then it's very hard to
remove, even if people in general looked at them wouldn't agree with
it.
So the Wikipedia could go to more of a parliamentary type system where
parliament writes the policies and tries to keep them consistent.
-Ian Woollard
That is a good example. I wanted to change Wikipedia:What Wikipedia is
not the other day and just went and changed it. Put a note on the talk
page and on the effected project page and that was all there was to it.
I doubt I would have even bothered to try if I had to get onto an agenda,
convince a dozen people unfamiliar with the issue that there was a
problem, that a certain change should be made, etc.
However, we have had experience with people skulking around changing
policy in order to have something to point to when they were violating
every policy Wikipedia has.
Fred