First, I dispute the notion that the German Wikipedia is "better" than the English one in terms of overall quality. Featured article count on de: reflects, to a large degree, a much stronger drive on de: to that particular process (which was on de: first - I copied it to en: from there) from various pages. en: is also more inclusive, meaning many more articles on obscure subjects which will never get featured. de: tends towards agglomeration where en: maintains separate articles. This all obviously affects the FA ratio in de's favor.
There's no doubt that de: has been very innovative when it comes to quality drives and similar measures; however, en: has adopted most of these and invented some new variants. There are some good ideas which we should take from de: (and the other way around -- it was the redesign of the en: Main Page that led many others to redesign theirs in a similar fashion, including de:), but there are also ideas which I definitely do not want to see copied because of some fallacious notion of "de: is better than en:".
I want to comment on three specific points Elian made:
German wikipedia has: the general channel #wikipedia-de for socializing, coordinating general work on the wiki, discussing events on wp, calling an admin for quick vandal bans etc. Rarely people who chat too much off topic (=not wikipedia related) receive a friendly kick. Other channels: #hist.wikipedia where most historians hang out. #phil.wikipedia - meeting channel for the philosophers. #bio.wikipedia - home of the biologists.
This is an excellent idea which should be copied in all languages. Right now.
One group of prominent editors sticks to the maxims on the page "Be cruel" (http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Sei_grausam ).
Bad meme; die, die, die. If that gets copied to en:, I will do whatever I can to get rid of it. It is the opposite of WikiLove and promotes an atmosphere of suspicion -- whatever the page text says, the title invites usage to justify any violation of policy. There's a reason for all that wiki culture of "Assume good faith", "Don't bite the newbies", etc. No reason to throw it out the window just yet.
We have "Be bold" as a way to add flexibility, and "Don't disrupt" as a general policy to deal with troublemakers. There's no need for "Be cruel".
The german wikipedia has no arbitration committee. A poll to establish one has not reached a necessary majority, the community divided about the question.
As a consequence, there is very little flexibility in dealing with problem users, and when you have one, you often end up with an indefinite block. My observation is that you have more sock puppetry and more extreme aggression as a result. It's a simple fact that bad users can and will evade blocks, so indefinite blocks against the worst ones often accomplish very little indeed. And those who respect blocks may be amenable to reason, so they should not be indef blocked either.
The flexibility of admins you mention may have led de: to become the leader in long term page protections, with some articles being protected as stubs for almost a year. At least that was the situation when I last ran a query on page protections: http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Longest_page_protections%2C_September_2005
de: is, I think, a good example of the consequences some extreme proposals in the "wheel warring" thread would have. Having an admin class that becomes increasingly reluctant to question itself can be just as problematic as one which is constantly flighting over what to do.
I welcome this discussion. We need to understand better what consequences certain decisions had in the histories of different Wikipedias. Like Carl Sagan touted Venus and Mars as examples of climate developments that could affect Earth, Wikipedias in other languages have a lot to teach us.
Erik