[Intlwiki-l] [Wikipedia-l] No voting? Then what?

[Toby Bartels]

[Note:  The post that I'm replying to wasn't sent to <wikipedia-l>.
        Or perhaps it was sent separately; I'm not sure.]

Anthere wrote:

>That also depends on exactly what *others* mean by
>"consensus".

>Please, try http://fr.wikipedia.com/wiki.cgi?Consensus

Ah, so if I'm willing to trust Wikipedia as a dictionary,
it seems that there *is* a French/English difference in meaning.
If only we spelled it differently from each other, then we could keep track!
In the meantime, the French sense of "consensus"
can be described in English as "unanimous consent", I think.
And since I can't write in French in the first place,
I don't have to worry about how to express English "consensus"
in that language ^_^!

OK, so clearly we have two ideas, each with its own word,
in fact apparently the same word, albeit in different languages.
We can talk about whether we should have consensus or unanimous consent
(or voting, or the autocratic dictatorship of Jimbo, or ...).
I myself would suggest consensus (whatever that may be called in French).

The sad thing is that we seemed to have a longstanding consensus
in favour of decision making by consensus, although that consensus
was breaking as people started to advocate voting more and more.
But now it appears that we may never have had such a consensus;
we had a consensus that we made decisions by a method called "consensus",
but unfortunately that word has different meanings in different languages,
so there was consensus only on the word but not on the thing itself.

That's the problem with foreign languages;
everybody should just use English the way that God intended,
which to be quite specific is the way that it's used by me.
(I hope that it's obvious that this last sentence is a joke.)


-- Toby