By turning these people away rudely, without hints, or with worthless hints like "try a search engine" to gain a few measly XP, we weaken the community. Who knows, maybe the Novice who has been lurking for months will come up with the next great Perl advance and we will never see it because we replied nastily to his innocent question.

On this specific point (gaining a few measly XP) I don't think you have much to worry about. Between a post that says RTFM and another post that adopts a more pedagogical approach with a couple of code examples, it's a no-brainer: the latter gets the ++ and the former gets nothing. Or possibly, from now on, a -- if it appears to be rude. Then again, if the sole response is a terse link to a CPAN module, that also gets a ++, because at least the person has been helped out.

Use your votes with care, and if people start to see that a terse answer garners them 2XP, and a well thought out vote answer garners them 20, they will start putting more effort into their answers.

Personally, I have a lot of respect for people who manage to answer the 27th post on how to compare two arrays, courteously or otherwise. These days I just tend to skip over those sorts of questions.