A higher status in any community/society means you are able to express the ideas which people can understand and appreciate and find usefulness in terms of value within a particular society. Status system helps you to measure your participation in that society. XP system in perlmonks helps in that way. It works both ways. You can also judge the society from your perspective and feedback it provides to your input.

Coming to your point, XP in my opinion refers to your relationship-points with the perlmonks community. Thus X in the XP refers to eXperience and not Knowledge within oneself. It's a different phenomenon that XP leads to believe that it's KP (Knowledge-Points), and that phenomenon is self-perceived even it may be a confidence booster.

Recently I am studying Genetic Algorithms and found that it is possible to obtain solutions without writing complicated logic. GA provides ability to solve the problems without understanding of the logic of the process which we build traditionally. Output is in the form of combination of input items, that would produce the desired result. In a similar way, you can get more XP with any society providing the representation of various skills in correct combination with better value of acceptance/fitness.