Has anyone thought about the practicalities of such broadminded acceptance?

I understand the concern about avoiding censorship and I agree on that.

However, how do you handle the daily routines of the Monastery?

• There are more than 3000 languages in the world. But let'e be generous and say that only the 20 major languages are seen in the Monastery. Could you imagine how to deal with such a Babel?
• How do you approve posts you don't understand? If it was posted to PerlMonks Discussions, for example, how do you know that it should be approved/moved to Meditations or SOPW?
• How do you address people to the FAQs or the instructions on how to ask questions, which are the basic principles of our community? Are we going to translate each piece of relevant information in every language that shows up? It took about three years to get those documents to the actual state, in one language only. How do we plan to deal with the additional languages?
• How do you consider a post for editing, deletion, promotion, if you don't know what is it talking about?

The Monastery is kept up to its current excellent status thanks to a system of community control. If the community is unable to exercise its power of self control, how is the Monastery going to keep its standards?

As for the availability of people who can understand the questions, how can you assume that the one who knows the language is the same who knows the solution? Making a back-of-the envelope calculation, I would say that it is unlikely that a question in whichever language gets the attention of somebody who speaks the language and knows how to solve the problem at the same time.

I am a non-native English speaker. I understand very well the problems of who is exposed to a foreign language environment and can't make himself understood.

However, I believe that by being more libertarian we will only create confusion and not solve many more problems than we create.

We shouldn't forget that we are a community. But let's get real. Principles are a good thing, organization requires some rules to adhere to, even if sometimes hurts.

I would love to have PerlMonks in my mother tongue, but I would rather force myself to speak a foreing language to partecipate in a well organized community than speaking my idiom within a mess.

Peace.