Enlightened perl programmers often complain about how outdated most online perl manuals. Truth is, some of the official documentation is quite outdated too. Perl ships with a lot of documentation, some of it is old and badly needing some maintenance.

For example, a quick ack through the documentation showed about 250 cases of open used with a glob as its first argument (e.g. open FOO; ), even one in perlstyle! I think everyone agrees that in 2010 that's no longer a good example. I don't think it has a place outside of perlfunc and perlopentut. The same argument goes for two argument open and use vars. I'm sure there are plenty of other issues that I can't think of right now.

That's not hard to fix, in fact you could almost write a program for it. It may be a lot of work though to fix all of them, but not so much to fix them one by one.

Some things are harder. Some things are a lot more work. Let's take some docs on object oriented programming perlbot, perltoot and perltooc for example haven't seen major updates since 1995, 1997 and 1999 respectively. perlboot and perlobj seem to have had the most loving the past decade, but can still use some more attention. Surely we all agree a lot has happened in object oriented perl in the mean time. We don't directly assign to @ISA anymore in our modules, do we?

But there's much more to improve in the documentations.

Why does perltrap list traps for perl4, awk and sed but not for modern languages like python, php or ruby? Why doesn't perlipc use IO::* instead of low level functions? Why isn't perlmodinstall Build.PL aware?

I suspect many other pieces of documentation that I haven't taken a good look at that could also use a spring (autumn for inhabitants of the southern hemisphere) cleaning.

The good part of the story? You can help. This work can be done not only incrementally, but also distributed.

Edited to add: So how to get started? perlrepository has detailed information how to submit patches. The easiest way is to fork perl at github and when you're done mail the perl-5-porters about it.