2009/8/28 Tony Sidaway tonysidaway@gmail.com:
It's 2009. Why is this happening?
Because voting is the only practical way of a large number of people making a decision. The policies date back to when we were a small project and could actually discuss things and reach a consensus, that just isn't the case any more for anything but the smallest of issues (like content disputes on individual articles, they still work by consensus sometimes). In order to make reality fit policy we add a "!". It's a kind of legal fiction, I suppose.