Erik Moeller wrote:
However, as you said yourself, the system doesn't work well for the non-English Wikipedias *right now*. What should we do to decide in these conflicts?
I honestly don't know.
One reason consensus works reasonably well here is that we can listen to different people's proposals and the _nuances_ of their language. There's a rich web of information communicated in our ongoing discussions, more rich than any simple set of voting alternatives ever could be.
Everyone knows that there are certain shared values that we express through our homegrown slogans (Wiki is not paper, Wikipedia is an encyclopedia, etc.).
I can plea for translations of what is going on, but that has proven to be not very successful.
If something happened in de.wikipedia, as an example, I could simply listen to a few people who I know well enough, who speak German, and advise them on things, but pretty much leave the tough decisions to them, backed up by my "official" stamp. There's you (a German speaker, right?) and Magnus and probably some others.
In other languages, though, I get long private emails from people who don't speak English well, accusing each other of various WikiWarCrimes, and it's just damned difficult to figure it all out.
--Jimbo