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?
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 ;-).
I think this is an important question, and my best suggestion is to appoint one or two ambassadors for each language, who can act as site owners towards the other users and as translators/reporters to Bomis and developers. Therefore I welcome the newly set up embassies.
Maintaining the neutral point of view and avoiding copyright violations should be the easiest part of the job. But how strict are the non-English Wikipedias on issues such as "Wikipedia is not a dictionary" (not a gazetteer, not a product catalog, not a consumer report, etc.)? Is it or will there be a problem to assert authority to weed out poor contributions in the small and slow-growing non-English Wikipedias?