Meta: This forum needs upvote/downvote

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Actually, Notebooks,Netbooks is now at 313 pages and accumulating.

 

What we need is the newer users to do a search first.  However, I expect that is not going to happen.

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Correct, this is not going to happen - and more importantly it wouldn't be very useful, since what to me is a sensible query for my question is going to differ from yours, and the next person, and so forth. Even if users did search (and many will), they often won't find what they're looking for, and you'll get duplicates anyway. You can give users better tools to significantly improve the signal to noise ratio rather than just saying ah we'll just have to live with it.

You can improve this by breaking topics down into narrower buckets (like a dedicated R7 section), and by making threads more scannable, especially for the most important content (via upvote downvote).

On the search topic, on StackOverflow when you type a question, they take the text of the question you're typing every 10 seconds or so, wipe out the 500 most common English words, and use the rest to search for similar questions (questions where, with the top 500 English words removed, there's significant overlap). They then show a short summary of those for you right next to the textbox you're busy typing in. Often this causes even those who would never have searched, and those who did but turned up nothing, to find exactly what they were looking for - all in the natural course of typing a question and submitting.

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Leho wrote:

I disagree totally re editing by others.  ... some very unfortunate consequences can arise if we allow other editors.

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I'd be scared of this too, but it's clear Worm is referring to the way StackOverflow.com/Stackexchange.com handle editing, which is probably not something most people are aware of. You can't even get access to it as a regular user, so it's easy to be in the dark about it. Here's how it works:

Using the site earns you Reputation. Most sources of Rep come from asking good questions and giving good answers. Downvoting anyone loses you a little Reputation to make you consider whether it's really worth knocking someone.

Once you've earned a little Rep (I think it's 50, might be 200), an "edit" link starts appearing under everyone's posts. When you see a typo or some other mistake in someone else's post, you can click edit right there and fix it for them. A few things then happen:

1) The person who originally wrote the post gets a chance to review/approve it.

2) Moderators get a chance to review/approve it.

3) High Rep users get a chance to review/approve it.

This has some nice benefits. For example, if someone posts something laiden with typos and a mistyped link that goes nowhere and vanishes, never to return, instead of that post sitting broken for eternity, one helpful user can propose an edit, and then a moderator or a high rep user can come along and approve that good edit. On the other hand, if someone harmful comes by the way you describe and tries to get a nasty edit in, a high rep user, moderator, or the original author can easily notice and Deny the edit, keeping it from polluting the discussion.

But that's all way more complicated than simple upvote downvote. I think having both, and making the act of downvoting cost you a little to your own rep, is a major first step, and a lot simpler and more valuable than the edit/approve process.