I would prefer Meta to be kept as a single site. If the content is
kept on one site and someone chooses to write in Hindi, for example,
then other people will at least see that comment and someone will be
able to translate it into English or their own language. If it was on
a different wiki, translation is far less likely to occur, so the
discussion would involve only the few people active on the Hindi
Wikipedia.
Having 150 different Metas for each language might sound a nice idea
in theory, but Meta has far too low traffic already. Splitting it up
is going to decrease participation even more. What would be the point
of a Meta in Italian if no one is participating there and things
happening on the other language Metas are not being disseminated to
the other ones? With 150 sites, who is going to take Wikimedia-wide
news to each separate language? If the other languages are still
supposed to watch the English one to know what is going on, what is
the benefit of splitting them?
Erik wrote:
Let's take the "Stewards" discussion and
vote as an example. The whole
discussion was mostly English as was the voting page. If we used
subdomains, we could have made it a requirement that the page be
translated into the main languages before we vote. We could have
aggregated the votes from the different language Wikimedias so that each
community could express their preferences in their language. We could have
translated important arguments from the discussion in realtime (in the
form of localized "pro" and "cons" lists, for example).
Why would you need subdomains to do that? You can force such
requirements whether Meta is on one site or not. In fact, having it
all on one site makes it easier as you can see when pages have been
translated.
Look at
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Translation/New_upload_form for
example. If the page had been only on the German Meta, how would
people who speak other languages know to translate it? At least this
way you can see which links are still red and which have been
translated.
This is a lot better than having a single page with
the occasional piece
of untranslated French or Japanese between a couple of participants. In
that case, the main part of the page is English - excluding those who
don't speak it - and some parts of the discussion are not - excluding
those who don't speak that language. It's a lose-lose situation.
If it's on one site, it is far more likely not to remain untranslated.
If a discussion on Meta is in Esperanto, it's far more likely to be
translated into the languages other users want to translate it into
that it would be if it was hidden away on the Esperanto Meta.
This requires some way to deal with namespace
conflicts - e.g.
wikimedia.org/en/Merchandising vs.
wikimedia.org/de/Merchandising (the current Merchandising page on
Meta is actually German), and we would have to set up automatic
redirects for subdomain access.
We already have a way of dealing with title conflicts.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Disambiguation
My comments above are based on what is available with the current
software. Obviously, if anyone wants to code a way to avoid needing to
check dozens of different recent changes to know what is going on,
that would be great, but until then, they should not be split just in
the hope that one day the software will make it easy to check all of
them.
-- Angela