Angela-
What sort of "Wikimedia presence" did you want there? Do the pages in the Wikimedia Foundation category not meet this? (http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Wikimedia_Foundation)
For ourselves, yes. For the outside world, we need something that the average journalist can navigate. Every Wikimedia chapter will want to have a nice URL to give to people for signing up, donating ...
de.wikimedia.org, en.wikimedia.org etc. would be consistent with the wikipedia.org setup. The current community directory style content could be put on a separate page like it is done for the Wikipedia Main Page. The actual Wikimedia entry page would mostly contain - links to all projects - donation form - membership application form (for chapters) - contact information
Keep it simple and stupid. HTML is definitely needed for this as well as some backend processing scripts.
If we split into sub-domains, it makes this easier to do, but if the translations are to be official, having 50+ recent changes for the board to check and approve makes this impractical.
True, but the current mixed RC isn't scalable without filtering. So whether you want filtering for the combined Meta, or synthesis-on-demand for the split up Meta, we need to add this type of functionality in any case. In lieu of a nice solution, a page "Pages waiting for board approval" on en and maybe fr would be sufficient.
Allowing the use of interlanguage isn't necessarily better than the current system on meta. By using templates, the links only need be updated in one place when a new language is added. Normal interlanguage links would need to be updated on every sub-domain.
This is essentially a hack. It's better to fix the interlanguage link system (by using a shared link table) than to use a custom solution which people have to learn for a single wiki and which doesn't work anywhere else. Consistency is good - currently Meta is a special case and that creates a lot of problems (like the Help: namespace not being localizable, interlanguage links not in the same place as everywhere else, etc.).
If the Foundation wiki and Meta are not separated, we have less control over it, as any sysop will be able to edit it
MediaWiki already supports limited rights management (write access to certain pages can be limited to one user group, e.g. "Wikimedia Editors"). We could relatively easily extend this to allow for selectively enabling HTML support. Limiting edit rights should be kept to an absolute minimum for obvious reasons.
Regards,
Erik