NMM Warship Histories

[PMarione]

The National Maritime Museum The NMM have released under a Creative Commons licence a large quantity of data they have gathered through their internal research. the data it holds on over 16,000 British warships from about 1500 to 1950 and is inviting the public to engage in a collaborative project to enhance the data.
http://www.nmm.ac.uk/researchers/research-areas-and-projects/warship-histories/
The NMM has partnered with Wikimedia to reach out to the many knowledgeable experts and enthusiasts around the world.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:GLAM/NMM

Certainly a good idea, alas...
The data provided are in the form of 12 pdf files who appear to be OCRed from cards without proof reading.
It would take more than one hour to go through the 12 files to have a chance to find a particular ship (chance as thousands of names are misspelled).

So I decided to make a little contribution to the project.
Here is a merged pdf file that make far easier to find info
http://www.creativem.com/ftp/incoming/Warship_Histories_Vessels.pdf
and an Xcel file where I have put the ships more or less in alphabetical order, removed most of the doubles and the empty fields
http://www.creativem.com/ftp/incoming/Warship_Histories_Vessels.xls

I hope this can be of some help.
@+P

[PMarione]

There is still a lot of work to do on this file :

• check for the numerous misspellings specially in the ships' names
• put some order in the "services" of the ships : they for example are not in chronological order
•etc.

If somebody makes improvements on the file, I would be glad to replace the file here.

Does someone know how to contact the people in charge of the wikipedia project ?
I have tried but I can't find my way through the wikipedia way of contact.

@+P