Brion Vibber wrote:
Updates to any file in MediaWiki should be submitted as a unified diff against the files in CVS (cvs diff -u) FOR EACH AFFECTED BRANCH (the REL1_4 release branch is not the same as the current development work in HEAD), posted as a file attachment to a bug report in Bugzilla. Assurances that it's been tested are helpful.
I added brions text above to http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Locales_for_the_Wikimedia_projects put a deprecated note on the page and removed all red links.
For creating clean locales, I propose to set up a wiki only for this purpose where a team of volunteers can translate the locales via the mediawiki namespace in a coordinate effort (doing this via the mediawiki namespace has the advantage that you can test the stuff live and see formatting errors instantly). At a certain deadline these translations could be all converted at once into the according Language files and released together with mediawiki. If that's sounds feasible to you and someone sets up a wiki for this, I'm willing to maintain the german language version.
greetings, elian