I looked into that and my understanding was that the people in the
wikipedia and wikitravel communities do not want to have overwhelmingly
detailed and specific information. This is not a criticism of these two
sites, I think such a policy serves their cause. The rationale for
Wikipedia was that having too much detailed information would deter its
use as a general purpose encyclopedia. I guess the argument is:

You wouldn't open the Encyclopedia Brittanica to learn how to dive or what
the maximum depth on the Wolfe Islander Wreck is. What you would do is
open the encyclopedia Brittanica after you've heard someone talk about
scuba diving and you want to learn more. You'll get a general feel and
then the encyclopedia will say "Go see this other book".

A similar argument would go for the wikitravel site. The Michelin travel
guide doesn't try to list every single dive site in the world.

Your suggestion of the use of portals is interesting. I had a discussion
with some of the members on the wikitravel site about the usefullness of a
separate wiki. I guess the options are to either make a semi "wiki in a
wiki" using portals or create an entirely different wiki (as we've done)
and later on add integration features (interwiki links and so on) between
wikiscuba and wikipedia and wikitravel. I guess both could be done. I feel
an entirely separate wiki gives more flexibility. One idea I've been
dreaming of was to have a small database for each dive site so that users
could enter some information (let's say date and time of dive, bottome
temperature, surface temperature) and the wiki page would be automatically
complemented with a graph of bottom temperature vs. the time of year and
so on. Such a feature would be useless to most people on wikipedia or
wikitravel, but could potentially be quite useful on wikiscuba.
(Unfortunately, I'm not good enough at this to make such a thing and I
haven't found a programmer crazy enough to try to do this, yet! Anyone
interested?)

I know there are good dive sites out there. I see two advantages of wikis.
One is that if information is inaccurate or lacking, users can add it
directly and automatically, without having to send it in to an "editorial
board" or something similar, which 1) delays the process and 2) makes it
difficult to update someone else's information. It's probably quite simple
for someone running a website to post verbatim a new review that's been
sent in, it's probably much more trouble to make editorial edits to stuff
that's already there. I could imagine someone sending a message saying
"This article is pretty long, could you split it in 2 and then add this
information to the first part and that bit to the second part..." This is
something that users can do directly on a wiki.

I've never actually contributed to the traditional websites, so I may be
overemphasizing these problems. This was the answer I gave to myself when
I asked: "What would be a better way to do this?"

The problem I think we are faced with right now in starting this wiki is
that there isn't a single comprehensive publicly available source of all
dive sites in the world (which is to be expected). I think when the people
of wikitravel started, they created an article for every country from the
CIA world factbook, which is in the public domain. That gave a good
backbone to start on.

Regards,

Charles