Shortly after I thought we'd finally killed off the habit of excessive
polling, an apologetic, humorous and evidently quite common meme
appeared on Wikipedia: the "!vote".
Unlike the "vote", the "!vote" seems to afford the author the
latitude
to falsely claim that he is opposed to polls and is not in fact
engaged in a polling exercise.
In short, a "!vote" is simply a way of recasting polls so as to avoid
calling them polls. "!Polls?"
The reason we avoid polls? Because they lead to vote-counting
(counting "!votes" is the same thing even if we're supposed to pretend
that a "!vote! is not the same as a vote). Because they lead to
taking sides. Because they destroy efforts at compromise. Because in
the worst case they encourage people to create a separate section for
people who agree with one another to congregate their comments, where
there is no danger of their comments being mistaken for attempts to
reach consensus by discussion.
I'm seeing ban discussions on [[WP:AN]] being turned into polls, and
attempts to undo this are resisted by people who apparently believe
they're following Wikipedia policy.
It's 2009. Why is this happening?