--- Toby Bartels toby+wikipedia@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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