Daniel-
Absolutely not! We need ONE place where we can all
come together. That place
is currently meta. I'm therefore very strongly opposed to balkanizing the
only common place we all can edit. The interface issues need to be fixed and
Meta should be made into a truly multilingual wiki.
Having multiple languages in one wiki doesn't help people to come
together. In fact, in my experience, it does the exact opposite.
Parcipation on Meta by people from languages like Chinese or Japanese is
minimal. I'm afraid Meta is perceived as an extension of the English
language Wikipedia.
You can't eliminate the language barrier by throwing all languages into
one big pot. That only means that the most popular common one - English -
will dominate and small pockets of non-English discussions will form. This
is what has happened on the multilingual mailing lists and it is what will
continue to happen on Meta if we stay on the current path.
The reality is that because of the language barrier, there *are* different
communities. Because of national barriers, there *are* different Wikimedia
interests. And there's no reason why an interesting global policy
discussion shouldn't be started by people who speak no English whatsoever,
and then be translated into the main languages if there is a vote.
While I would prefer it if all languages of a project were handled with a
single database and codebase, this requires quite substantial changes to
the current code, and is unlikely to happen anytime soon. And if it
happens, we can port all the existing wikis over to that new system. But I
think we should strive for a consistent approach.
Regards,
Erik