I would prefer Meta to be kept as a single site. If the content is kept on one site and someone chooses to write in Hindi, for example, then other people will at least see that comment and someone will be able to translate it into English or their own language. If it was on a different wiki, translation is far less likely to occur, so the discussion would involve only the few people active on the Hindi Wikipedia.
Having 150 different Metas for each language might sound a nice idea in theory, but Meta has far too low traffic already. Splitting it up is going to decrease participation even more. What would be the point of a Meta in Italian if no one is participating there and things happening on the other language Metas are not being disseminated to the other ones? With 150 sites, who is going to take Wikimedia-wide news to each separate language? If the other languages are still supposed to watch the English one to know what is going on, what is the benefit of splitting them?
Erik wrote:
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).
Why would you need subdomains to do that? You can force such requirements whether Meta is on one site or not. In fact, having it all on one site makes it easier as you can see when pages have been translated.
Look at http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Translation/New_upload_form for example. If the page had been only on the German Meta, how would people who speak other languages know to translate it? At least this way you can see which links are still red and which have been translated.
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.
If it's on one site, it is far more likely not to remain untranslated. If a discussion on Meta is in Esperanto, it's far more likely to be translated into the languages other users want to translate it into that it would be if it was hidden away on the Esperanto Meta.
This requires some way to deal with namespace conflicts - e.g. wikimedia.org/en/Merchandising vs. wikimedia.org/de/Merchandising (the current Merchandising page on Meta is actually German), and we would have to set up automatic redirects for subdomain access.
We already have a way of dealing with title conflicts. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Disambiguation
My comments above are based on what is available with the current software. Obviously, if anyone wants to code a way to avoid needing to check dozens of different recent changes to know what is going on, that would be great, but until then, they should not be split just in the hope that one day the software will make it easy to check all of them.
-- Angela