FAQ:Roles

This project needs multiple roles filled. Try out some and see what works best with your personality. Swap between them if you get bored of being one type and want to try a different aspect.


 * Explorers are on the never-ending quest to find more file formats, more obscure references to file formats, and hidden away gems and information the File Format Problem can use. They reference the Sources or even find brand new Sources to use and add them to that list.
 * Backfillers go to already-extant entries and add in greater details, including summaries, links to pages others have written in the web about the format and the subject, and acquiring some select images or items to represent the format. They pull from the Sources but also just do the basic effort to make a page be something more than blank.
 * WikiWonks look over a given page and fix the MediaWiki encoding so that the items is more easily readable. If you create general templates that can serve out pages better, please propose their implementation to Jason Scott and if it looks good, we'll apply them to the whole of the pages that fall under the template. The more time freed up to acquire information, the better.
 * Essayists are writing or referencing sets of documents to create critical new histories or descriptions that go far beyond a technical view of a format. If there are litigation, research, or human aspects to the format that should at least get a summary, the Essayists are adding them.

A blog posting claims there are three types of knowledge: what you know, what you know you don't know, and what you don't know you don't know. The last is by far the biggest category. Creating mentions of file formats (however obscure), even if they're tiny stubs here or even redlinks, helps bring formats out of the "stuff you don't know you don't know" category (the original blog used a four-letter "s" word instead of "stuff") into the "stuff you know you don't know" category, hopefully paving the way for somebody to later research it some more to bring it up to "stuff you know" (with a full-fledged informative article).