Can we do anything to change the dynamic of the site?
YES. We can all vote more!*
I see lots of suggestions here for dealing with bad questions and content but I actually think as a community we already have that part figured out. Anyone who is an active participant on ServerFault can pretty quickly identify content that doesn't fit well with the site. A question or answer is bad or incorrect? Downvote it. A question or answer is off-topic? Vote to Close. The only additional thing I think we could improve upon is leaving polite comments on why a new user's question was downvoted or closed. Perhaps a set of standardized comments could be integrated into the Review UI or we could all just start using Greasemonkey.
I think we need to ask the question the other way around. Instead of asking, "How can we stem the flow of bad questions and content?" maybe we should be asking "How can we encourage good content and make sure it quickly floats to the top?". I think they're are a few ways we can do this: 1) Reassess our audience, 2) reassess our scope and 3) vote more. I'll address each in turn.
1) Reassess our audience
This has been talked about ad-nasuem and is pretty well covered in many of the topicality questions on Meta. As @Rachel points out I think it's pretty clear that the Server Fault is for Information Technology Professionals line in the FAQ might better be stated as Server Fault is for Professional System/Network Administrators. I don't want anyone to think that I'm advocating being anti-developer or anti-DevOps. If you are a developer, or a network engineer or an Extreme-Agile-DevOps person and you are working as a Systems/Network Administrator in a professional capacity and your question meets the standards expected of a professional in that field then your question is completely and totally on topic in that respect. You know how they say, "On the Internet, nobody knows you are dog", well, "On ServerFault, nobody knows you are a developer" if your question is for all intents and purposes indistinguishable from a question posted by someone in a more traditional Operations role.
The problem with stating that the audience is Information Technology Professionals is that all of a sudden a whole host of things that not relevant to Systems Operations look very relevant and very on-topic. These are questions like, "How do I make my XAMPP/LAMP/WAMP installer work?", or "How do I get IP tables?" and so on. After all, Developers are Information Technology Professionals and their question relates to their work in a professional capacity (as in, I can't code because I can't get this System thing to work), so they come here, post their question, get fishslapped and then go away and say that we are mean. This isn't helpful to us and isn't helpful them.
I think that the Information Technology Professionals scope really has the potential to turn ServerFault from a place for Operations folks to talk about Operation-y things (a good thing!) to Operations folks doing tech support (a bad thing!). Just look at the screen cap of the front page in @MDMarra's answer - we are being treated like tech support for SO. And I'm not the only one that feels this way.
2) Reassess our scope
I like to think I'm a good example of ServerFault's target audience. I'm a Junior Systems/Network Administrator for a governmental organization with about 500 users. I've been working professionally in IT for about four years. I have a decent grasp of the basics. I have a whole bunch of questions that I would love to ask here because there's so much experience and I know I will receive high quality answers.
Unfortunately, the questions I am interested in asking fall into three general categories: a) They are soft-skills questions, b) they are highly specific technical questions, and c) they a very general systems building architecture questions.
a) Soft skill questions like "What kind of format works for technical resumes?", "Is it worth getting a NetApp certification for a job with the following duties?" are all off-topic on ServerFault for good reasons.
b) I don't ask questions that are highly specific to technical problems because I expect that they will get closed as either To Localized or go unanswered due to the deep-knowledge issue addressed by sysadmin1138 in the Why "professional capacity"? question. An examples of these kinds of questions would be a very ugly periodic issue with Samba's RID to UID/GID mapping that would break NTLM authentication to our Squid Proxy Server that nagged us for over a year before it was resolved upstream by the Samba team. I find that I often push these questions to either payed support or to development/technical mailing lists with good results.
c) I don't ask general systems building architecture questions because I expect them to get closed for not being specific enough (so NARQ or NC). Honestly, this is where I think ServerFault could really shine. An example of a question along these lines are, "How can I bring configuration management (along with documented change and revision control) to a Windows Server environment using tools like SCCM, PowerShell, MDT, WAIK in a manner similar to what Puppet or Chef can do for Linux?" or "How can I introduce Windows Core to our Test/Production tiers while keeping the Full Install at the Development tier without running into integration issues during applications deployment?" I think these are great examples of Good Subjective questions (see (Good Subjective vs. Bad Subjective)[http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2010/09/good-subjective-bad-subjective/]) but there's no doubt in my mind they'd be closed. Like I said, I think these kinds of systems building or architecture design Good Subjective questions really should have a home here and really could be an area where ServerFault really excels as a resource for professionals.
3) Vote More
So what's a guy like me to do on ServerFault then? How about answer some of the newbie questions? I like answering questions. I get to explore problems or topics that I wouldn't typically, I get to help people and I often learn something new.
Here's the problem, no votes. I won't pretend that my answers are anything that special but it is incredibly frustrating to roll up my sleeves, grab a unloved question that has potential but needs a little polish and roll out a decent answer and then no one bothers to up or down vote, either the improved question or my half-way decent stab at an answer (see here or here. I can't imagine how frustrated the old guard feels when they're repeating this process for the 90 millionth time.
As someone who is only an occasional participant in ServerFault I can't say I'm really a part of the community here but even I try to get a dozen or so votes in a day. That's pretty horrible by most standards but around here unless things significantly changed since Ward's Call to Arms for voting, it's apparently not that bad:
Someone who votes every other day, and manages 11 votes each time, will rack up just over 2000 votes in a year. There are only 5 people who've done that much voting so far this year (yay!), and a grand total of 13 who look like they might get there by the end of the year.
In summation, here's me, right smack in the target audience and I rarely have any questions worth asking, no one up (or down!) votes my answers or edited questions and all I really do on ServerFault is the necessary but admittedly tedious task of wading through the Review Queue. Eventually, I'm going to get bored of doing that and I'll stop using the site altogether and while I can't imagine that my inactivity will be of any great loss to the community, if experts like Ian and John Gardiner aren't interested in participating and the people that eventually (after an admittedly long time) become experts like me aren't interested in participating, ServerFault is doomed.
