Personally I don't vote to delete nodes which may be a little offtopic but monks have taken the time to post some useful responses anyway. But I do not think it is impossible to improve on the situation, although I do not have as much experience as Tye here. (hmm too many negatives in that sentence? means I yet hope.)

As Tye mentioned deletions are delayed so deletions mainly seem to affect the data-mining side of PM. But some simple facilities might provide constructive outlets for monks' frustration, in the area of behavior modification of newbies and preserving an amicable atmosphere.

First, short but to the point responses are not evil. This is not javascript.com is okay too I'd think. If people post answers anyway, then maybe it is a problem which comes up often in a Perl development context. What's a few more bytes. If monks of a certain level can mark the thread as offtopic that would have an immediate effect and reduce frustration among the frustrated too I think. Of course those marked offtopic would stand out if they are few. Maybe we could also have a way to mark a thread as very on-topic too.

One thing that frustrates me is when I realize that I've spent tons of time figuring something out which the questioner has not even committed the first iota of time in trying to figure out. So I would hope we can be less harsh but more educational. Also of course antisocial stuff is antithetical to PM as a community so it is good if we can have immediate responses and not just wait weeks (? sorry not meaning to sound accusatory) for the node to be reaped after it has already had time to incubate.

Similar tools which show up for high-level monks would let them make subtle changes quickly, while not granting full editor rights. If that is desired.

One thing which I've thought of a number of times (and maybe it exists for all I know) is that the title of a node could be displayed as a text input field instead of as ordinary HTML text, to make it easy to change the title. Obviously there is a reason why PM was designed to let lots of people vote on changes, but if you think about it, a misleading title can waste the time of lots of monks too. My guess is that obvious ones get lots of votes to be edited, so why not let some of those monks who are voting just change it quickly. Or make it automatically get edited to a pre-prepared title if a certain percentage yes vote is reached. Not only would this save saints' time, it would have an added effect if the top page had just the titles displayed for the next 20 articles at the bottom of the page.

As for PM not being a "great" archive site, personally I think it's pretty good all things considered. Of course it could be much better and it is not impossible. The key is to leverage the many eyes and hands touching the data. For example, we could keep track of the search keywords and let searchers vote on which nodes were the most helpful. Not using XP votes, but a search vote. Similarly these nodes could be associated with the search keys. It would be another step toward actually trying to categorize and codify the (still somewhat) chaotic collection of knowledge in PM. Letting monks (a lot of us) add nodes to editable categories in a subject tree would become a parallel effort with immediate results.

Perhaps links to nodes which monks take the time to add to their responses are another source of valuable information. Just culling a list of all the hrefs that exist could be useful. Perhaps we could have a node which appears on the right side of the page that lists every href in the thread, with a pull-down menu that has a list of subjects under which to file it if it seems useful. New subjects could also be added in the same form. This would be a relatively simple and yet extremely powerful way to codify our knowledge as a group and magnify our brains, as well as creating a space to which questionners may be quickly directed.

Also Biker said there is no way to objectively measure the quality of a question, but I think we do have some applicable tools. The number of responses, total votes on the thread, votes on the question, number of hyperlinks, and (maybe) the average XP of each responder times the number of lines in their posts could be used. We also could certainly use a pull-down menu item to score nodes or even threads as a whole, to provide a composite qualified score a la slashdot mediation scores. A combination score such as "5:Solves Common Problem; 4:Interesting Technique; 1:Smells like a Camel" would not only inform searches, but it also would allow us to locate nodes and threads in a multidimensional space (cluster analysis!) and this might even be more interesting than our current XP. If many people use it and are allowed to add voteable characteristics we will get a good composite quality judgement from the monks which preserves individuality and it could even be useful or fun.