The trouble with this is that in many cases, people who are very important to Perl and who have great knowledge to share have been too busy working on Perl to write a book.

I'm thinking here in particular of Chip Salzenberg who I've noticed round here posting a number of very useful nodes. His knowledge of how Perl will actually run a particular piece of code is probably better than Randal's. Should we give him mega-XP?

Another great example is Mark-Jason Dominus. A great "explainer of Perl" both in training courses and in articles (if you don't know the name, see http://www.plover.com/~mjd/perl/ for proof). He's been too busy for the last couple of years to write a book, but he'd be a great asset to perlmonks. Would we give him mega-XP?