Technical documentation on module formats - appropriate for the wiki?

[mabersold]

I've generally been referring to this site to find technical documentation on mod formats: https://ftp.modland.com/pub/documents/format_documentation/

While it's an excellent resource, the documentation is not standardized and is sometimes written confusingly. I was wondering, is the OpenMPT wiki an appropriate place to put technical documentation on file formats? It would be nice to have a single place for reference with a standardized style and clear information on how a module type is structured.

[Saga Musix]

Generally I don't want the wiki to grow a place to host absolutely everything remotely related to tracked music, so currently it only contains development resources relevant to the formats OpenMPT can save. I think ModLand is a great place for those documents and I don't think lack of standardization is really a problem. Documents have often been confusing but it's important to preserve those original documents, which is why often corrections have been posted (see e.g. MODFIL12 in that folder).

https://wiki.multimedia.cx/ has information on some tracked formats but it often also incomplete. In the end, nobody probably wants to convert dozens of file format documentations from one format to another in their spare time and fix all the mistakes. That's why reading other mod players' codes is often the better way to learn how to accurately play a file. I know, it's not optimal, but you can hardly blame people for not wanting to do technical documentation at such a detailed level without any compensation.

[manx]

In the end, nobody probably wants to convert dozens of file format documentations from one format to another in their spare time and fix all the mistakes. That's why reading other mod players' codes is often the better way to learn how to accurately play a file.

Not only that, but "converting" the confusing and old documentation to any standardized form will inevitably create further confusion due to "translation" errors, in particular if the person has not yet dealt with the specific format directly in code form.