I think the answer is relatively simple to state: Perlmonks is about helping to solve problems. Anyone's problems.

For the most part, it has discouraged and successfully avoided the mistake of allowing particular individuals or cliques, to dominate the discussion and influence the membership through the promotion of their political and idealogical ideas.

No matter where you come from, or what your programming background, or what platform you use, if you're using Perl, you're welcome here.

Just as the language that forms the basis of this place exhibits and encourages TIMTOWTDI, so the community that has evolved around Perlmonks not just tolorates, but promotes TIMTOWDI in the lives of the people it accepts in to that community.

That has meant that whilst there is a core of deeply expert Perl & CS competent people here, there has persisted a tolorance for those just starting out on their journey with Perl. "Dumb questions" are not just tolorated, but accepted and encouraged, rather than summarially dismissed as being too low-level to be asked, never mind answered.

Unlike so many other places on the web, everyone here has a contribution to make, and is encouraged to make it. The newbies "dumb question" may be far below the interest level of the acknowledged experts, but it just right for the monk that joined last month and discovered the answer to that question just last week. And even if that answer isn't the perfect answer, it will phrased and explained such that the newbie asking understands it, and so make progress on his journey with Perl.

Six months from now, he may be ready to hear the better, usually longer and more complicated answer from the expert. But in the mean time, he has been enabled to make progress, at his own speed, by getting an answer he understood. Now.

And that means he stays around. And that he might be in a position to answer the next newbies "dumb question", next week, or next month.

And that's the magic "secret ingredient" of Perlmonks. New blood.