An idea that was formed from some discussion:
More effective closing / downvoting of junk questions to help with the signal-noise ratio?
How about a waiting period for Questions to be Answered:
You have to wait a certain period of time before you can Accept an answer in order to give time for better answers to appear. This is no different.
There is no special queue, or special set of people that approve and nothing is invisible.
Why not do the inverse:
Low Reputation users or Users with lots of Closed/DownVoted/ZeroVoted questions can submit questions, but they can't be Answered until some time has passed to give the community time to enhance the question or curate it to allow for a better question to be submitted or be moderated appropriately before the reputation whores get to it.
There are lots of tuning opportunities here:
- Once you get a certain rep your Questions no longer are subjected to the probationary period.
- Having a low accept ratio would extend the probationary period.
- Having a majority of Closed/DownVoted questions would extend the probationary period.
- Having a high accept ratio would reduce the probationary period.
- Having a majority of Accepted/UpVoted questions would reduce the probationary period.
- CloseVotes / DownVotes / UpVotes could increase or decrease the probationary period.
- Moderators could remove the probationary period immediately if flagged.
- Maybe you could spend Reputation to get your question published quicker, similar to the Bounty concept.
Immediately increase the quality of answers if nothing else:
This would would be a huge dis-incentive for those posting terse, half-baked or naive answers immediately and would give those that take the time to actually respond with a good answer time to be on equal footing.
Doesn't have to be a long wait to have a huge impact:
This could potentially solve lots of the problems with the drive by/vampire/anonymous/one time users that are just shot gunning the internet for an immediate quick fix.