Wikipedia:WikiProject Caves

This WikiProject aims primarily to improve articles related to caving and describe the Earth's caves in a consistent and complete fashion. The parent of this WikiProject is the WikiProject Geography.

Important note. In spite of the vast quantity of caving literature lost in libraries, there are very few active Category:Wikipedian cavers. Your contribution is valuable. The information below is intended to encourage you with helpful suggestions. You are not obliged to take any notice.

The work of project will unfortunately be skewed towards caving in the United Kingdom at this early stage until more members based in other countries get involved. If the general purpose articles don't fit with the way you do things in your own country, don't be discouraged. It means your input is needed.

Similar Wikiprojects

 * By structure
 * WikiProject Mountains, WikiProject Volcanoes, WikiProject Rivers, WikiProject Lakes, WikiProject_Maps, WikiProject_Geology.


 * By activity
 * WikiProject Backpacking, WikiProject Kayaking, WikiProject SCUBA.

Objectives

 * To encourage stuff to happen!
 * To get caves more in the awareness of the public.
 * To archive surveys and photographs onto wikimedia where possible.
 * To create a complete reference of where information can be found (e.g. for each cave, list of all guidebooks which write it up).
 * To create the environment for wikibooks to get written (e.g. Cave Rescue OUCC and Cave Rescue CUCC could migrate into a single wikibook which would pull in related references on specialized topics of relevance like Terminal burrowing).
 * To create common on-line IDs of so that outside systems can refer to them in a joinable manner (e.g. if the Yorkshire permitting system used WP URLs, it can automatically relate to an on-line caving club diary -- this does not mean editing the WP article each week to say who has the permit for the weekend - it's about having a common reference ID which makes it possible).

Participants
Can also mark down as Category:Wikipedian cavers.

Templates

 * Infobox cave – for an article about a cave. Will in future make it possible to auto-generate Lists of deepest caves


 * Caving-stub – for an article about caving
 * WikiProject Caves – for putting into talk pages about caving

Main articles
Bring the following articles up to good article standard:
 * General articles
 * Caving, Speleology (what's the difference?), Cave surveying, Cave diving, Cave rescue, and anything in Category:Cave geology, many of which need photographs.
 * Any articles that live in Category:WikiProject Caves


 * Notable caves
 * Titan (cave), Lechuguilla Cave, Wookey Hole Caves


 * Notable cavers
 * Édouard-Alfred Martel, Sheck Exley, Martyn Farr, Jim Eyre (caver), Jochen Hasenmayer, Jack Myers, Gordon Batty, James Larkin White, Graham Balcombe, J. C. Coleman


 * British Caves
 * Pen-y-ghent Cave, Juniper Gulf, Swinsto Hole, Simpson's Pot, Leck Fell, Lost John's Cave, Notts Pot, Ireby Fell Cavern, Rumbling Hole, Goatchurch Cavern, Cave Rescue Organisation

Categories
There's a frightening tree of categories below Category:Caves_by_country which exists in a dozen other languages. Perhaps it could drill down by region (Yorkshore, Mendip), and consider all other categories (caves with fatalities, caves prone to flooding).


 * Category:Limestone caves
 * Category:Wikipedian cavers

Lists of caves
There are pages containing lists Caves of the Mendip Hills.

Other languages
The general articles have versions in other languages which might have a better structure. Some caves (e.g. Aillwee_Cave) are present in multiple languages and should always be linked up. Pictures and surveys can be borrowed across.

Survey software
Find and create pages for all established cave surveying software and make a category for them.

Page has been made for Survex.

Need pages for Therion (prob as Therion (software), check for standards), TunnelX. Compass Walls Toporobot and whatever other things are floating around.

Pages should have references to who's using them, when and where they were written, are they still being developed, what are they compatible with, and so on. Basic stuff. What you need to know to compare like to like. Check out Compass Points (Cave Survey Group publications) on-line since 1993 from which to extract the history.

There's a 2001 list by Wookey here.

Whenever a cave is listed in WP, we want to as best we can research and record the owner, availability and format (hence the pages for survey software) of the survey. 99% of the date is being lost, often due to carelessness.

Caving equipment
There is a Caving Equipment page under development. Please help to develop it, especially with regard to differences in equipment used in different countries. See Hiking equipment for a guide to how it may be done.

There are items of equipment at the heart of the sport which have evolved over time (not always for the better). What did they use to be like? What are they made of? Where do the standards of practice come from? What documented incidents have involved this equipment?


 * Electron ladder, kermantle rope (links to properties of Nylon, date of invention), wetsuit (originally was no lining, made with geartape, and used talc to get it on, what year?), Petzl Stop (has anyone chemically analyzed the change in the composition of metal over time?), PVC oversuit, foot jammer, snoopy loop.

There's a category Category:Caving equipment.

Hints on contributing to a cave page

 * Important This section is for help only. You do not have to take any notice of it.  Whenever you get stuck, use the discussion page or write a note on the Talk page of a member of this project.


 * 1) Look at other examples of pages for caves, for example Castleguard Cave or anything from Category:Caves by country.
 * 2) Use Infobox Cave to structure the vital statistics for the cave. Someone can later improve the layout and all cave pages will get better automatically.
 * 3) Take photographs of the entrance or inside and contribute them to wikimedia. If you have more than several good ones to illustrate the article, use the Gallery_tag feature.
 * 4) Search the web for all high quality pages to the cave and make references to them. Many caving clubs maintain a database of most caves in their area however very few of these maintain them online. So don't be discouraged if little information exists.
 * 5) If you are a Wikipedian caver you probably have many caving books in your house. You can collect facts out of them and use Cite_book to refer to the information which you are showing. This not only shows that it's sourced, but it tells others exactly where they can read more. The rare newspaper or BBC article about a cave also makes a very good source that people often want to read but are guaranteed never to find.
 * 6) Not every cave needs its own page. Wikipedia polices on notability and verifiability apply.

Surveys
Efforts are being made to collate cave surveys for the purpose of doing satellite imagery overlays. See:
 * Caving in the United Kingdom
 * http://seagrass.goatchurch.org.uk/~mjg/cgi-bin/map.py

You can also use the Template:Superimpose to mark the entrance on a large scale map. Work to make the entrance simultaneously on a survey map which is overlayed has been less successful and probably is best done as its own image or elsewhere on the internet.

Wikipedian stuff

 * Put caves you have visited on your user page. Nobody does this, so it's cool at the moment.
 * Join Category:Wikipedian cavers (based on Category:Wikipedian hikers)
 * Add Template:User caver to your user page, or design your own

Tools

 * Main tool page: toolserver.org


 * Reflinks - Edits bare references - adds title/dates etc. to bare references
 * Checklinks - Edit and repair external links
 * Dab solver - Quickly resolve ambiguous links.
 * Peer reviewer - Provides hints and suggestion to improving articles.