I didn't use much Perl, other than to reformat the data so I could load it into Excel.

Average node value is 11.87. The median value (as many nodes have lower or higher values as the median) is between 7 and 8. 90% of the nodes have a value between 0 and 40 XP and 99% of the nodes have a value between -8 and 90. Both ranges are centered between the extremes of -223 and 571 XP, i.e. 5% of the nodes has a lower XP than 0 or a higher XP than 40, resp. 0.5% is worse than -8 or better than 90.

The XP distribution is not a standard Bell shaped Gaussian distribution, but something which peaks around the average value and quickly drops down to low values, with long low tails to lower and higher values.

What does it tell us:

• average and median are close together and most of the nodes cluster around these values: most of the nodes are thus of average value (for whatever meaning you may give to average).
• Perlmonks are quicker to give positive XP than negative XP as 95% of the nodes have no negative XP.
• Relatively speaking few nodes are very bad or very good (only 1% is worse than -8 or better than 90), but even here we are quicker to praise than to chastise (the positive tail goes much higher than the negative tail goes deeper, for an equal number of nodes).

Does this mean that most of the nodes are well written or that that generally the Monastery is easy on the authors of nodes? That alas is something these figures cannot tell us.

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