Some of you will know that Jason Scott, Rogue Archivist, is raising a citizen's army to attempt to solve the "file format problem*" in the month of November, 2012. The work is taking place via a wiki at http://justsolve.archiveteam.org/index.php/Main_Page, with a band of volunteers (you need to register to make changes to the wiki, by sending a username and email address to [log in to unmask]). I've added a few formats and groups of formats myself (at least as skeletons or empty placeholders).
The best form of help is for some of you who know more about rarer data formats to register and help by editing the wiki yourself. It's pretty easy; I've never used MediaWiki before, and everything I've done so far has been by finding something like it and adapting the wiki source. Other people can make it beautiful and standardised later on!
If you can't do that, you could email me information about missing data formats. This should include as much as possible of:
- name, and what it's for (ie brief description)
- web site with some authoritative information
- web site with some examples, etc.
Let's try and capture ALL these formats. As Jason says in his own inimitable way "Let's make that goddam army!".
* Note, the "problem" is only vaguely defined, and after some angst (eg see http://unsustainableideas.wordpress.com/2012/07/04/the-solution-is-42-what-was-the-problem/), I think that's OK. Gathering a huge amount of information about file formats in one place will be a BIG HELP.
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Chris Rusbridge
Mobile: +44 791 7423828
Email: [log in to unmask]
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