Should YA just be about interaction or should it also be striving for quality.?

That's an excellent and thought-provoking question (and I liked your commentary, as well). In fairness, I think the YA team are pretty well aware of what's working and not working, and they're doubtless tweaking and/or contemplating tweaking the site all the time. But it's obviously helpful to put together a thoughtful question or comment, as you have here, to add to the discussion.

In answer to your primary question, I personally think it should be a bit of both: positive interaction and striving for quality in the Q&A. I see nothing wrong with healthy debate and polite exchanges (and no, I do not view this as "chat" and "noise" as some sticklers seem to do). However, I can also see the need for quality control in terms of the acceptability of questions and answers.

I suppose if I were on the YA team my attitude would be as follows: When I see members leaving comments for each other that are clearly relevant to the Q&A exchange they're participating in, I would definitely leave it be. There is no harm in civil dialogue and I think we need to accept the human element here. We're all individuals, all human, so we have different ways of expressing ourselves -- but we do feel the need to do just that: express ourselves. We're not automotons, we're flesh and blood. So as long as it's not like literal chat (i.e., "Hey TommyBoy, are you coming to my party?" or "What's your email address, SuzieQ? You're hot!") but rather an exchange of comments that are germane to the ongoing "conversation" that is in fact the Q&A, I see zero problem with that.

Otherwise, quality control should be more about determining what is and isn't a legitimate question. "Am I cute?" is obviously not. But I think "What would you consider to be attractive in a woman?" is a legitimate question. See the difference? The dificulty comes in the fact that there are so many questions being submitted every second (it seems) of every day. I imagine any efforts at quality control must be nightmarishly taxing on those who have to do it. So I think it's nice if we all try to be responsible with our submissions to make their jobs easier.

Mea culpa: I haven't done that every time, myself, and I'm anything but proud of that fact (extreme provocation notwithstanding). But I've apologized to those who deserved to receive an apology and I've pledged to stay on the straight and narrow for the remainder of my time here (how ever long that is). Consider me properly chastened.

Now, if I could only learn to answer questions more concisely... ;)

Merit Demerit system??? Yeah, that's been suggested under the "Yahoo" category since I've started this mad house.

This place is like a giant gathering of us humans. We all have our "Free Will" and we can individually act different from day to day. Imagine you're at a giant dinner party. At this party, you ask and answer questions. There will be different results depending on the parties involved. You can't bop someone over the head to accept the answer you've given <unless it's breaking the rules like porno/advertising ect…>.

Authority? Well, remember, it’s a diner party environment. You can ask your questions, but be pre-paired for the jokers, shy people, devil’s advocates, and the answer you’re looking for. Likewise, when you answer a question, be pre-paired to be trumped by the joker, shy people, devil’s advocates, or someone more intelligent than you. The real issue is that you’ve got your two cents in and although the asker of the question didn’t hear you the way you wanted to be heard, others did hear you …

<Which brings me to my brown - nosing commit> By the way, I loved you're answer on the 'German Pope' ... It should have won the 10 pts <in my opinion>, but the asker was defiantly not in an 'tolerant' mood. Hey, I’m Catholic too, so of course I’ll stand with you.

If you wanted to strive for quality then perhaps you should have posted on a more appropriate board.

Interaction is validation, an odd way of prooving your own existance by generating crap on the world around you, a way of reconnecting to the universe by making the universe a part of you.

There is actually more incentive in prooving your existance (if that's the way you swing.) than attempting to score points.

I'm all for quality responses ! !

I think there should be some way of awarding negative points for, say: sloppy posts, irrelevant answers, poor spelling (not just a typo or two), name calling, etc ...

Maybe YA could simply add a "quality answer" up/down vote to each answer?

Hey, good question - especially since I have seen LOTS of completely atrocious spelling and grammatical errors. I think we should be able to vote on more aspects of people's answers, not just the informative qualities.