Shameful, Simply And Sadly Shameful

Courtesy of WOWSA, Huntington Beach, California.

Openwaterpedia is a unique, comprehensive, multilingual online reference tool for the aquatic community.

There are currently 30,994 different entries with 68,850 pages of content that are useful for research, reference and expanding one’s knowledge and appreciation of the sport with the following entries as of July 2019:

• 18,853 different entries for People in the open water swimming world
• 3,228 different entries for Terms in the open water swimming world
• 3,271 different entries for Places in the open water swimming world
• 1,783 different entries for Products in the open water swimming world
• 362 different entries for Pilots in the open water swimming world
• 969 different entries for Services in the open water swimming world
• 1,546 different entries for Coaches in the open water swimming world
• 789 different entries for Records in the open water swimming world
• 5,209 different entries for Events in the open water swimming world
• 2,919 different entries for Groups/Sites in the open water swimming world

Last year, many people have edited and added information to Openwaterpedia a total of 516,960 times with over 30 million view as of 2018.

“But, very unfortunately, there is someone – or a group of people – who are going through the content of Openwaterpedia and changing the information – or deleting information – from thousands of pages,” said creator Steven Munatones.  “This person – or group of people – are not deleting pages, but rather purposefully changing data on swimmers’ pages so the resultant information is incorrect.

We have no idea why someone would do this.  Why would they purposefully and intentionally take information that is useful to open water swimmers and media around the world – and change the data to incorrect information?  Whatever it is, they have a perverse sense of satisfaction to destroy the hard work of volunteers by purposefully changing information.

For example, we have to correct information on the pages of Hank Wise and Nejib Belhedi because someone went to their bios and changed the information.  I cannot imagine why anyone would be motivated to do so.

It is shameful and has been going on for years now.  The volunteers who help maintain this resource for the global open water swimming community cannot keep up with the purposeful hacking.  We try, but these people keep on creating havoc.

If any swimmer or user of Openwaterpedia sees information on their own pages or pages belonging to others with incorrect information, please bring it to our attention.  You can send a short email to headcoach@openwatersource.com and we will endeavor to correct the information as soon as possible.”

For more information, visit www.Openwaterpedia.com.

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