About this wiki
Information about dive sites today is dispersed across websites, forums, and people.
Many of these websites and forums that once contained a wealth of information are no longer online, only accessible through the Internet Archive, and no longer indexed by search engines. Others are poorly designed and/or have commercial interests, account requirements or paywalls making it difficult to access the information. Still others are online and available but are not actively maintained by their owners. Others contain content almost completely generated by computers and little usable information.
This site is an experiment to see if a wiki project could do better than those sites.
Since anyone can edit, even without an account, there are no barriers stopping anyone from updating site information. Since there are no advertisements or commercial interests, all information is easily accessible and not hidden.
The hope is that information stored in existing sites and divers' heads can be amalgamated, indexed and cross referenced here to form a useful information base for dive sites all over the world, that is useful, accessible and up to date, for use by divers all over the world.
Its success (or failure) will depend on the willingness of divers to contribute and edit information about the dive sites they're familiar with, and on the positive collaborative attitude of the diving community.
We will see if it works!
Bootstrapping
Why not Wikivoyage?
Some of the structure of this site is modeled after Wikivoyage's dive guide articles. These articles tend to be very high quality. However, there are a couple reasons I think Wikivoyage may not be the best place for a global dive site index.
The biggest one is that Wikivoyage has a bootstrapping problem. Wikivoyage could be a great resource if people added dive content to it, but no one goes there for dive content, so no content will be added. There are a few reasons no one goes to Wikivoyage for diving content.
- Limited breadth - while the dive articles that do exist on Wikivoyage are typically high quality, their regional breadth is very limited. Virtually all of the diving guides are specific to the South African coastline. There is almost no diving information outside that region.
- Too general - Wikivoyage has a huge amount of information on it but only a tiny fraction is specific to diving. This makes it somewhat difficult to locate diving information for a specific region in Wikivoyage even for the regions that have it; there's so much other content to sift through that it can be buried.
- User expectations - the average diver will assume they need to go to a diving specific website to find diving information. They will not think to go to Wikivoyage. Most have probably never heard of it. I had performed countless searches for dive site information in the past and never knew Wikivoyage had any diving content until I started this website. In fact, I didn't even know Wikivoyage existed.
One final note regarding Wikivoyage:
Any contributions made here will live on no matter what happens to this site.
If this site fails to garner any attraction and dies, all contributed content will be merged into Wikivoyage. It will already be in Wikitext format and all media will be appropriately licensed. Wikivoyage is maintained by the Wikimedia Foundation and thus is as close to permanent as any website can get.
Unlike other sites, anything you contribute here will never be bought out, put behind a paywall, served alongside ads, or simply disappear from the Web, and you don't have to choose which of the existing siloed websites you think will "win" or last the longest.
Bootstrapping
This site will attempt to solve the bootstrapping problem by:
- Being diving specific - this will assist in both SEO and diver perception
- Being as broad as possible - users will be more likely to add an article if categories and articles on nearby regions, and especially nearby sites, exist already; this will be achieved initially by...
- Importing as much existing content as possible - there is a ton of diving content out there that is compatible with Creative Commons that can be shaped into useful site articles; much of it is offline and only accessible via Internet Archive, so most other sites don't have it
- Not requiring an account - I believe accounts are a major impediment to attracting user contributions. As soon as you throw a sign up form in front of someone you are asking too much. Even if they make it through the form once, they have the burden of remembering their credentials, remembering how your site works, working around the crappy UI...wikis solve all of these problems by being stable, accessible, familiar (everyone knows what Wikipedia looks like and how to find things), and allowing anonymous contributions. Nothing stands before the diver wanting to share their knowledge.