tl;dr
- Make "Similar questions" search take the body of the question into account (keyword scanning).
- Flag newbie posts with an auto-tag that goes away when their rep exceeds a threshold.
- Ensure that newbie questions don't count towards that threshold (only answers).
- Archive newbie questions unless the questions get voted up or the user graduates.
Background
When I joined Stack Overflow, IIRC, it was mostly to answer questions, and mainly because I had seen some awful Networking answers that were downright dangerous from a security perspective that needed to be corrected ASAP. I think I've asked maybe a half dozen questions on the various Stack Exchange sites in total.
On the flip side, sometimes I have joined a Stack Exchange site specifically to ask a question. I always have done at least some research before getting to that point, so they're never newbie questions. And having to wait a week before posting would pretty much mean that I'd choose to ask in a less-than-ideal forum rather than wait the week.
With that said, I also recognize that I'm probably the exception. Most new users are probably also new programmers, rather than folks who joined the site after programming since they were six or so. That's no doubt why I see so many low-quality questions. Most of these questions suggest that the people involved are just getting started and really don't know what they're doing yet.
There is a definite benefit from helping newbie programmers move beyond their problems. Even though these newbie questions have a tendency to be specific to mistakes that they have made that nobody else would make, and thus are often useless to the community as a whole, learning from the answers to their questions will help ensure that their next questions are better quality.
My Approach To Answering Questions
Some days, I'm in teacher mode, and I'm willing to patiently help anybody with anything. On those days, I go out of my way to help people, sometimes even staring at really painfully bad code to try to figure out what they're doing wrong, and I usually give them a long list of tips for making their code better in addition to making it work. That's my "teacher mode".
Other days, I get home after a long day of working (or teaching), and I just want to focus on helping people who are having problems that they couldn't solve by asking any random programmer with more than one year of experience. On those days, having a Newbie tag that tells me "let somebody else who has more patience look at it first" would be a godsend. If it doesn't get an accepted answer in a few days, I'll look at it on a day when I have more patience. :-)
Proposed Improvement
Based on that, what I would propose is the following:
Whenever somebody joins the site, they have a Newbie badge. This means that they're new to the site, and that their questions should be treated as suspect. This badge should go away when their rep exceeds a particular threshold.
Any question posted by anyone with a Newbie badge should be auto-tagged with a Newbie tag. The auto-tagged Newbie tags should go away when the user exceeds the Newbie threshold.
Anybody with a Newbie badge can upvote or downvote content from people with Newbie tags, but it won't add to or subtract from the Newbie's reputation.
Upvotes on Newbie-tagged questions will not affect reputation at all. So if you're a newbie, the only way to get rep is to answer questions, thus proving you actually know something beyond how to ask questions.
If a question is tagged "newbie", unless that question either gets untagged by the newbie gaining rep or gets modded up by someone who is not a newbie, the question should be archived a month after they get their first answer, or six months after posting, whichever is later. Once archived, these questions will be visible to the people who asked the questions and to anyone who posted answers, but won't pollute search engine results.
There should be an "Include archived questions" checkbox to let you perform a search that includes newbie noise.
Newbie questions that have not been answered after a long period of time should "bubble up" so that they get higher visibility in various ordered rankings, under the assumption that the reason for the lack of an answer is probably that they're legitimately hard, and thus possibly not a true newbie question.
If the lack of an answer turns out to be because the question was just too much work for the limited benefit, somebody will no doubt mod the question down and undo the bubbling.
After you fill out the body of a question, when you submit, the site should scan the body for interesting keywords and then use those to search for additional related questions. It should then ask you to look at those questions to see if they're helpful, and should have disclosure triangles that show summaries of each question inline. For new users, it might be worth requiring them to disclose all of them before submitting.
Benefits Of This Approach
This approach has several key benefits:
We'll be able to glance at the tags and immediately know that there's a high probability of a low-quality question. If experts feel like helping out, they can do so, or they can save their energy for questions that are likely to be more interesting and challenging.
Newbies can help each other out, and it won't change their newbie status. That means there's no problem with leaving the low-quality content out there, segregated slightly by the presence of the tag, because it isn't going to result in ranking inflation for the users who post the low-quality content, confident that it will eventually get archived and hidden from view.
It encourages newbies who aren't clueless to take the time to look around and try to help others, thus boosting their rep and making it more likely that their own questions will get answered by people who aren't complete newbies.
Because it is a tag, any user who is posting a question on a subject where that person actually feels like a newbie can use it to make it clear to folks that the question might be a stupid question, and making it less likely that someone will ding them with a downvote.
The quality of answers you get from search engines and the quality of questions will be on the whole much higher.