Something you seem not be taking into account is that it's not the people just posting short replies to anything; there's a constant influx of new users who are asking:

• the same questions which have been answered here numerous times (and of course they didn't bother using the search box first)
• questions that are as I mentioned below answered quite succinctly by the standard documentation (or another well known site / FAQ / text)
• questions which indicate a lack of understanding of programming fundamentals (in as much as there are quite a number of non-programmers who stumble into (or are pushed :) using Perl) or Perl's limitations ("Why does it take 30 hours to search through this 2G file which I parsed into a hash on my computer with 64M or RAM?")

And that's to say nothing of the hordes:

• asking HTML / Javascript / PHP / miscellaneous web questions which have nothing to do with Perl (" . . . but I figured you guys would know anyhow")
• attempting to get someone to write their homework assignment for them ("I have this friend who's trying to . . .")
• expecting free support for some commercial product or service rather than bothering the people they bought it from ("I found this on a haxx0r site^W^W^W^W^W^Wbought this and was wondering . . .")
• mistaking this for freshmeat.net / versiontracker.com / Google ("I need a PERL script to do . . .")
• . . .

Since you distinguish questions and answers: most, but not all, of the noise (I wouldn't call it spam) is from people asking about simple things that they should have read in the docs first. But the de facto community response to this is accomodating, whether by substantive answers or by pointers to the docs. On the question side of things, it seems that if you don't like the noise, you're better off not fighting it. I'd suggest that you either thicken your sunglasses or adopt as your favorite forum (say) c.l.p.m, which is less tolerant to FAQs. Take it as a psychological given that you are unlikely to get people to change their behavior just by complaining about it.

On the answer side of things, in general you're asking why people reply with myths; the solution to that riddle lies in the riddle itself. They reply with myths presumably because they believe they are true. This is the case in all communities. The question is how receptive the community is to people who call on the myth. In my humble opinion, PM isn't bad in that respect either. We've had dogma-challenging posts here, we've had contoversies here. Nothing is stopping you from writing a substantive Meditation about a something you think monks hold a wide misconception about. Don't jump to the meta-level yet, please: unless you think there's a *Perl* myth going on about, this whole discussion is academic. I am pretty sure that if you write up a well reasoned noncomformist post, it would get all the attention it deserves.

Is Perlmonks a search engine that you passively ask questions and get answers in return? Is it not rather a forum for discourse? What is the worth of PM, if not as a facility to allow many people to benefit collectively from the learning experiences of each individual? Do people post misconceptions knowing ahead of time that they are wrong? If a popular misconception goes unposted and in turn unrefuted, how will awareness that it is a misconception spread?

Makeshifts last the longest.