I agree with several others above that an updated version of the manual would be very beneficial to new (and current) players.
Previous discussions of the creation of an updated manual have presumed that the end product would be a new static PDF version of the manual. The production of such a PDF document, however, is a mistake.
An updated version of the manual should be an HTML document, readable in any browser. The virtue of an HTML document is that unlike with a PDF: (a) little layout is needed and (b) an updated manual can be produced piecemeal instead of being fully completed before it sees the light of day.
Below is a screenshot of one small part of an HTML document I just created that updates the current manual with information about running the game with modern hardware. You will recognize the text as coming from the "What's New" document which appears in the main game directory. What you see below is the only change I made to the original manual and is only a proof of concept.
The process involved in creating the HTML document was simple: I used Adobe Acrobat Pro to export the PDF of the current manual to HTML. Then, I added the text at the bottom using Dreamweaver (an HTML editor). This approach, however, is imperfect. First, the HTML created by Adobe Acrobat is horribly verbose, which matters for speed and ease of editing of the document. Second, the quality of the images created by this process is often quite low. Third, Acrobat is unable to strip out the background on the pages and, so, adds hundreds of image files of the background throughout the HTML document.
A better pathway to an HTML update of the manual: Matrix (actually, its designer) opens the original design document for the print/PDF manual, removes the background from the pages, removes the page number from the pages, and then generates HTML documents for each chapter.
These files could be uploaded to the server Matrix uses, and someone could be given access to the appropriate directories so that a team of people could make the many small and big changes the manual needs. (I'm not sure that anyone would want to host the new manual because of potential bandwidth costs.) The manual would not be a static PDF document but a "living manual" that slowly integrates updated information. So, instead of waiting for a mythical complete rewrite of the whole manual, players would have access to a (slowly) updated manual starting in a few weeks.
If InDesign was used to create the print/PDF manuals and if the full package of files (including images) were sent to me, I could create the HTML versions of the chapters for other people to edit. (I just opened up a 2003 InDesign document with the current version of InDesign, so I'm pretty sure a 2009 InDesign document can be opened up.)
If Matrix if fine with the above process, I imagine that at least three people would have to agree to work on the living manual to make it become a reality.
(A separate issue is what use could be made of material appearing on the forum, say by Alfred. Certainly anything appearing on the forum could be rewritten, but I don't know anything about matters related to copyright claims on material appearing on Internet forums.)
; Julia Child
