Note that:<p>• Manpages <i>are</i> short. The average length is around 4 pages printed, much of which is pro-forma. Some run longer. Shells in particular (bash(1) runs around 98 pages piped through 'pr').<p>• Manpages include an EXAMPLES section, though this isn't always filled. That should be considered a bug.<p>• Manpages suffer from various projects attempting to deprecate them in favor of other forms of documentation. I particularly fault the GNU project's attempt to shoehorn info in place of man (the availability of man to Web utilities such as Debian's dwww largely wholly supplants this: info and the WWW were born within months of each other, Stallman and the FSF should have conceded the battle decades ago). Red Hat and the GNOME project have also been notably lax in providing manpages for utilities and programs. The Debian project considers omission of a manpage for an executable to be a bug, though not a release-critical one (I wish this severity would be increased).<p>• Fixing the deficiencies of existing manpages (and beating upstreams over the head with these until they're accepted) would be preferable to creating numerous externally maintained nonstandard variants. <a href="http://xkcd.com/927/" rel="nofollow">http://xkcd.com/927/</a>