• Keep an eye on your goal: If XP really mean something to you, and you want to be encouraged by that, then forget the 'level' part for your purpose. Just set the sight on XP.
• Knowledge based level:Understand that perl lives and rules by motto of TIMTOWTDI (There Is More Than One Way To Do It) and thousands of modules at CPAN. So the progress is not linear in sense of perl. That makes perl society worth its value compared to FAQ and Guides. Point here is that you cannot have level/XP decided upon knowledge, level here is decided by 'participation' and that's the best practice for the society.
• Self assessment from perspective of society: Self-assessment is a good idea to learn something. In that case, you can pickup any book/faq/guide/module and decide points for yourself and give points when you finish it. The real value of self-assessment is realized when you answer practical problems of the monks and try to understand how you can provide better solution that may worth something. Knowledge just for the sake of it does not carry high value from the perspective of society. Knowledge definitely can lead providing better value to the society in terms of finding more interesting tools only when comes in contact with the problem which again leads toward contribution to the perl society. The way PerlMonks has been built is like swarm technology
• XP System Changes: Often I have seen suggestion in change in XP system. These are often proposed by monks who want to measure their knowledge in terms of XP, which is a wrong concept to begin with. We should have said somewhere in big bold letters: XP = Participation at Perlmonks. Which holds true for many society we live in real world. ( Of course, the act and parameters of participation changes according to society and time)

• A NEW idea for Self Assessment: We can build a huge checklist of things to learn about perl collectively by monks here and have an access to individual in such a way that they can measure their progress by checking the items. It may give realistic view what could be achieved. We can simplify the system in such a way that whoever proposes the checklist item should be good in the same. An tem could be 'displaying database records in XML' for example.

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