I am sorry I cannot respond to this in full. In 24 hours I need to be on the other side of the continent giving a talk and I don't have room for much else.

But I was not trying to slam this site. No matter what this site does, it will be wrong for someone. I have seen people here using 5.004, 5.005, and 5.6. These are all different. You simply will not get a single reference, be it a book or a website, to conveniently document all of these in any straightforward way for people to use. Whether or not this documentation is updated, it is a mistake to encourage people to rely on it.

Instead what I would love to see is to have every page taken from Perl's documentation have up top a disclaimer like this:

This documentation may be for a different version of Perl than what you have.
For more accurate documentation please type perldoc (whatever)

Letting people know the problem and encouraging them to get the answer from the right place would IMNSHO do far more good than telling them to rely on this site and trying to be all things to all people.

BTW you should see Tom Christiansen rant on this topic some time...