I don t believe that most people will be upset with following directions from the legal team especially since maintaining some consistency between language editions helps editors who are not native English speakers I like your appeal from the developers idea In my check of recent watchlist notices all but one used passive voice but I think that your marketing sense is better than the previous posters there Formal testing on na ve users is already being done you can see a brief report on the latest round at mw VisualEditor Design User testing In addition VisualEditor is being used with apparent success by thousands of IPs and newly registered users each day at other Wikipedias