Motivation: I think it's good to encourage newcomers to MMA and MMA SE to continue participating here as they continue to learn Mathematica—especially when their first questions are closed for being a "simple mistake". How can we do this?
Two ideas (and subquestions):
1. Vote-to-close and upvote
On this site we see lots of newcomers to Mathematica (and therefore Mathematica stack exchange) asking questions that are closed without answers because they "arise due to a simple mistake, syntax error, or else are easily found in the documentation" and are resolved immediately in the comments.
But closing a question—especially someone's first—because it's essentially "too simple to be worth answering" has a lot of "intimidation power". I think it's worth taking measures to reduce this.
When I vote to close a question for this reason, I like to upvote the question as well. This might seem contrary to the "upvote only useful questions" policy, but I think of it this way: the question will be closed soon and therefore the votes "won't matter" (to the site), but the asker will still know that their asking of a question—and therefore, more importantly, their presence on the site—was still valued. As such, they might be more likely to stick around and feel comfortable asking future questions.
But is this a good idea? Do various site metrics factor in upvotes even on closed questions? Are there any reasons to not do this?
2. After-the-fact comment with encouragement, explanation, and resources
I've seen the "Welcome to MMA SE!" comment template (often from user bbgodfrey) appearing on questions from new users (see here for example), and I think it's great!
I've seen an analogue of it for questions about to be closed for simple mistakes, making clear that this process is just routine site clean-up, and asking OP not to be discouraged from further participation—for example, the comment by user rhermans here.
I'm wondering if it would be useful to automate this process. (Or both processes, if bbgodfrey is doing all this manually!) Is it within the capabilities (and interests) of the mods to set up a bot that performs this task? How difficult would this be? Or would an external "bot" account be useful? And would it be a good idea?