We had a pretty big discussion in #parrot about the value of this ticket set. People on the project plowed through the Trac database and closed tickets, and even with that we still hundreds that tracked all sorts of development. Many were bug reports, and many were effectively to-do items, and many were bug reports that had been resolved but still couldn't be closed for various reasons, such as needing an automated test to verify it.
It's nice to start over clean, but sometimes there's too much baby with the bathwater.
Thank you for the article, BTW. It may be obvious to some but not to most. Especially contributing to documentation. I'd say that most open source projects can benefit more from that than from new features ... and maybe even most bug-fixes, depending on severity.
Agreed about documentation, and at the top of my to-do list for today is making final edits to another article for them on open source documentation. Should be out in a week or two I think.