Anthere-

Meta is the only place where we can really meet, and find information that someone else left.

Can you give me a single example where splitting Meta by subdomain would do any harm in bringing people together? I would like to move this discussion from the general, emotional "Don't split us up!" to the specific, rational "This is where it would cause problems" level. What recent policy discussion or vote would have been harmed by this approach?

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).

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.

In my experience, it does bring people together, provided that you welcome the interaction.

I can't interact with someone whose language I do not speak, unless someone translates it for me. A Wikipedia-style setup facilitates that.

Plus, there are japanese and chinese people currently over there. We have Tomos, Suisui, Britty etc...

Exactly - the people on Meta are mostly the ones who speak some amount of English. Someone who doesn't speak any English won't even understand the user interface.

This is what is happening on the multinlingual mailing lists, because each time someone DARE putting a word in a language different than english, he is severely told that "of course, he could write in english, because really, no one can understand him".

First, I must remind you that my main objection in the last debate on this matter was using a different language in order to exclude others from a certain comment. This is a completely separate issue, and I would have the same objection on Meta.

Second, if you want to reach the *largest number* of people, you should either use English or make sure that what you say gets translated into English. That should be very obvious, no? It would be helpful if you could acknowledge this simple point.

Translations become far easier with a consistent approach, and people feel more welcome if the main site they navigate is in their mother tongue. This seems to work very well for Wikipedia, I don't see why it shouldn't work on Meta.

This is about giving non-English projects a larger voice instead of relying on multilingual people like you to act as mouthpieces for those who don't speak English. Just like there is a Wikipedia community for every language, there should be a Wikimedia community for each. Once you have something like ja.wikimedia.org, the creation of a Japanese Wikimedia chapter becomes more likely as well because people will find it far easier to interact when there is no constant interference by what is *effectively indistinguishable from random noise* to them. The problem of creating project-wide policies is addressed through board review and voting standards.

It may be a good idea to put this issue to a Wikimedia-wide vote if we fail to reach consensus.

Regards,

Erik