So I frequently watch the python tagged questions on SO, and have discovered something I believe to be an issue, you may disagree, but I wanted to at least pose this to the community. This one in particular is about Python but I believe it probably spans to other areas as well. I have noticed that a large amount of questions that are asked could be answered with very minimal effort on the part of the user, by either googling, looking through documentation, or even searching through other SO questions.
For example. There are approximately 165,000 questions with the python tag. A search within that revealed that about 62,000 (a little over 1/3) or all Python questions were about strings. At a quick glance showed that an overwhelming majority of these questions were extremely basic, were derivative of other questions, and/or could have been found out with a little research. I feel that many of these questions are simply cluttering SO.
Now, I recognize that there is an existing method for correcting this, the "Down Vote", but many users see these easy questions as an opportunity to gain some quick Reputation, so there is a feeding frenzy when one of these pops up. People seem to be rather conservative with their down votes, reserving them for more malformed and unclear questions rather than redundant ones.
Is this desired behavior, have I just missed the mark on this one? If this bothers anyone else, are there any ideas on how to correct this? I love the "Questions that may already have your answer" feature that suggests questions that seem like the one you're asking. But it's either not good enough, or people just ignore it and ask their question anyway (I feel the latter). So, just wanted to get everyone's thoughts on this.