I've been struggling over the whole "what's easiest for newbies?" question myself.

One of the things that this new site is meant to do is help people find newbie-related stuff, but I wonder if maybe just overhauling this site would accomplish the same thing...?

It seems that one solution would be to rigorously maintain a wiki article that is directly tied to a thread here on ITt (bi-directional links) which distills the wisdom of the thread into an article. But that is a lot of work, and if only one person is maintaining the article, it can be pretty overwhelming...

It would be nice to refine the "thanks" system to rate or classify or tag posts (perhaps a system like on Slashdot?) so you can skim a thread and only read the posts that others found helpful -- but not just a binary system, where it is either "thanked" or "not-thanked", but you can read a thread with your filter set to 3/5, so posts of moderate interest are also shown, not just super-interesting posts...

Off-topic posts and side discussions can be very interesting at the time they are posted, but they make wading through a 100-page thread overwhelming... Sometimes, when someone posts a very technical question to my "easy Debian" thread, I wish I could move the whole conversation somewhere else, or hide it from newbies, or something, thus leaving the original thread "cleaner".