Daniel-
How about a setup like this: de.wikimedia.org en.wikimedia.org fr.wikimedia.org
Absolutely not! We need ONE place where we can all come together. That place is currently meta. I'm therefore very strongly opposed to balkanizing the only common place we all can edit. The interface issues need to be fixed and Meta should be made into a truly multilingual wiki.
Having multiple languages in one wiki doesn't help people to come together. In fact, in my experience, it does the exact opposite. Parcipation on Meta by people from languages like Chinese or Japanese is minimal. I'm afraid Meta is perceived as an extension of the English language Wikipedia.
You can't eliminate the language barrier by throwing all languages into one big pot. That only means that the most popular common one - English - will dominate and small pockets of non-English discussions will form. This is what has happened on the multilingual mailing lists and it is what will continue to happen on Meta if we stay on the current path.
The reality is that because of the language barrier, there *are* different communities. Because of national barriers, there *are* different Wikimedia interests. And there's no reason why an interesting global policy discussion shouldn't be started by people who speak no English whatsoever, and then be translated into the main languages if there is a vote.
While I would prefer it if all languages of a project were handled with a single database and codebase, this requires quite substantial changes to the current code, and is unlikely to happen anytime soon. And if it happens, we can port all the existing wikis over to that new system. But I think we should strive for a consistent approach.
Regards,
Erik