I think you've quite hit upon it, adrianh.

To say that "experience" herein reflected that in the real-world would be an oversimplification, for there are many who visit the site who are deserving of much, much higher rank than myself, but for whatever reason have not been able to spend much time here, and thus do not yet have an XP rating that would come close to reflecting their actual experience and assistance to the perl community at large.

By my (perhaps limited) understanding, "experience" or XP herein would, for the most part, seem to be an estimation of the helpfulness of a particular individual in regards to the community as made by the community, revised each time the individual participates in the community. Factors that can affect the increase or decrease of XP are probably best covered in the page describing the Voting/Experience System.

In reply to Re^2: Loss of experience points seems inconsistent with reality by atcroft
in thread Loss of experience points seems inconsistent with reality by Tommy

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":


  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.