I worry sometimes that I may be reinforcing this sort of problem. I can be welcoming when I'm mindful, but a number of times I've found myself posting comments (such as here,) which would be culturally acceptable in an exchange between established members, but may be too hard on someone who can't fall back on the knowledge that they're still accepted and respected as a community member.

On the one hand, we don't want to drive down our standards as a community, but on the other hand, if we expect newcomers to be up to at least the average level of established members here, we'll be filtering out a lot of the people who stand to actually learn from participating.