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That's a really good observation. A lot of very highly ranked answers no longer apply, and still they are very visible due to their score.

If the idea is to be the "wikipedia of programming", I wonder if "votes" are enough. Should there be an active initiative to prune stupid/bad questions? Revisit old answers?

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It's actually worse than that. The accepted answer by the OP is pinned to the top forever (or until OP changes his or her mind, which is often never), no matter how many downvotes the pinned answer collects.

Possibly just need to reduce every answer's score a little every month to favour answers which are actively being voted up more recently.

Then you vote to close the question. It may take a while but, eventually, it will be deleted. Just yesterday, I closed three or four such questions in a brief visit.

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