German solutions
Apart from the three “official policies” (Neutral Point of View, Verifiability and No Original Research), which are valid throughout Wikipedia, each language Wikipedia is free to choose their own policies and administration. Whereas most Wikipedias simply translate the policies from the English Wikipedia, the German Wikipedia had some original policies, which were different from the equivalents in English Wikipedia:
Userboxes
The userboxes are simply standardized boxes which are placed on the personal pages of the users. Some userboxes simply state facts about the person, like “This user speaks Japaneses” or “This user lives in New York”. However, things get more controversial in the realm of opinions, especially since the existence of a userbox template might make people think that Wikipedia might support that POV.
The German solution was to move them all, except the language templates, to the “userspace”, so that it would be clear that the opinion is linked to a user and not to Wikipedia itself.
On English Wikipedia, they were all allowed in the “mainspace”, except for the userboxes created for trolling purposes, like “This user is a Nazi” and “This user is a pedophile”, which were deleted swiftly. Then, the hell broke and some wikipedians started to delete userboxes: the Great Userbox Purge or the Great Userbox Wars of 2006 began. This made a lot of people forget that Wikipedia’s purpose is to write an encyclopedia and started wasting time quarreling over the userbox disputes. It ended in a compromise, and adaptation of the German solution to English Wikipedia.
Fair use
Fair use is a concept in American copyright law, which allows some limited freedom in the usage of copyrighted works. German law lacks it and and as such, the German Wikipedia banned it outright and only free-licensed images are allowed in the German Wikipedia’s pages.
An unintented consequence is that the forbidding of fair use keeps the Pokemoners away: they like articles with lots of pictures and in this case it not possible to add pictures without using copyrighted images.
English Wikipedia, on the other hand, included many fair use images and until recently, even images on topics for which a free replacement could be created very easily, for example, photos of public buildings. Recently, the fair use images deemed “replaceable” have been deleted, which fired a dispute between the Wikipedians who think that the usage of free images is very important for Wikipedia and those who think that fair use does not contradict its mission statement.
While banning of fair use images is unlikely, a compromise solution would be the requirement that every fair-use image to be approved individually after a discussion, with votes pro and against. That might increase a bit the internal bureaucracy, but the usage of non-essential fair-use images would be greatly reduced.
Stubs and stub categorization
Many short articles on English and other Wikipedias include a notice similar to this one:
This article related to German royalty is a stub. You can help Wikipedia by expanding it.
German Wikipedia held a vote and removed them outright, but on English Wikipedia, they are in full vigour.
The usefulness of such stub notices and their categorization is disputed: most readers of Wikipedia are by now aware that articles can be edited and the original purpose is therefore obsolete. The secondary purpose, to sort bad articles by topic is also not very useful: Few Wikipedians think that “today is a good day to update an article on German royalty”; usually, they browse and note the inferior quality in an article on a subject they are familiar.
Also, the stubs created more bureaucracy, the infamous stub-sorters and they clutter the edit history.