This is a great question!
Kurt Jansson wrote:
But what guarantee do you have that e.g. the German Wikipedia is "doing things the wikipedia way"? And what would you do if you knew we aren't?
Let's say that we found out that sysops on the German wikipedia were banning people for minor disagreements. Let's say, for example, that a group of German libertarians (I use this example because my political sympathies lie in this direction) started banning Marxists and socialists. And they did so, not because of vandalism, but in an effort to maintain a pro-libertarian and pro-capitalist slant to various important articles.
Then, I would remove their sysop privileges for abuse. (Only after considerable discussion, of course, and efforts to get them to straighten up.) But if that same group had legal, technical, and practical control over the server, I could do nothing.
I think it's very important that the people (often just one or two) working on a new international Wikipedia are already indoctrinated with our ideals (or have a social Wp-habitus, if that sounds nicer ;-). Otherwise a new Wikipedia could become totaly tendentious, and it would be very unattractive for others to participate. I fear this will happen in the future, but hopefully enough multilingual "old hands" will allways keep an eye on upcoming Wikipedias.
I think that's right.
--Jimbo