It is pretty common for a new user to show up asking truth questions ("what should I believe about X"), pastoral questions ("what should I do in situation Y"), trojan horse questions ("how do Christians explain the fact that doctrine Z is irrational"), or any number of other off-topic questions.
When we do occasionally get a constructive question from a new user, it is common for it to be poorly formatted, poorly-researched, unclear, or any number of other things making it worthy of a down-vote.
Then there are the additional difficulties of new users not knowing how to post links, or format a quote.
No one wants to see our new users discouraged by having all of their questions down-voted and closed, so some moderators (etc.) will often show up desperately trying to paste relevant links to our faq and meta discussions in hopes of band-aide-ing the user's posts before the answers spiral out of control or the user disappears. Others will take it upon themselves to try to salvage the post by editing it themselves.
My concern is that as the site grows, this is likely to happen more and more often. At some point the handful of trained moderators are not going to be able to keep up. (Frankly I feel like that is already happening.)
Theoretically, if a new user knew what the faq was, or were aware that they should scour the meta forums for any discussions that might be critical to their post, some of this could be avoided. But they don't. Because they are new. They don't know what they don't know.
This got me thinking: do we need some sort of required entrance tutorial prior to posting on the site? Possibly even a test as well? Before you are allowed to drive a car in the United States, you have to learn how to drive a car and then demonstrate your knowledge by answering questions, etc. Would that sort of thing be helpful here?