Can't speak for other Perl user lists but within PerlMonks it seems:
It's okay to ignore newbie questions. (leads to: Newbie question, rhetorical: Is there a way to see the community's rating of a question to "know" to even ignore reading the Title? Answer as far as I can tell: the "front page" presents the interesting questions.)
Someone who answers such questions has now done the noble deed of adding yet one more ounce of documentation to the collective pile. (For more responsible newbies, but who happen to lack access to the O'Reilly library, to find later.) And since the question itself was interesting enough to answer, the answerer may well have learned something in the process.
