--- Toby Bartels <toby+wikipedia(a)math.ucr.edu> wrote:
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 ^_^!
ahum, cough, cough. Well, when you look in a wonderful
Larousse 84200 articles (is 84200 articles enough for
a decent langage speaking ?),
and...well...okay...consensus does not exist in
french.
Clarification : it does not exist for the Acad�mie.
Don't repeat it to the french *Acad�mie* please. For
once, we have our chance...
I'm willing to trust Wikipedia as a dictionary here
:-)))
More than the academy, for the notion of consensus
*does* exist in french.
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).
May I add a point here, for the lines below are really
head spinning.
It seems the final blocking vote must be made (that's
personal self control) only if the blocker deeply
believe the potential decision is gonna be *very
harmful* to the project/community. A bloking vote over
the feeling the decision is stupid or useless is
wrong.
Likely, the certainty that the decision is going to
have destructive consequences, can be supported with
good arguments. If the blocker is in a good community
where people listen to the others, good arguments are
listened to, and the blocker will not appear
unreasonable.
If the blocker just block because he thinks it is
useless, then his block is probably not to be
considered.
Theory !
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.
It sure is the case on the fr.wiki. We agree on the
word. Not on the way :-)
And from an international point of view, if we are all
to work together, we must share *some* values. How do
we know we share them ? How do we know we are talking
of the same thing ? When even in english you may not
be ?
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.)
uh, no, your way is ok. But imho God has nothing to do
with that ;-)
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