Slosberg The Shrewd Sleuth

Courtesy of WOWSA, Huntington Beach, California.

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

Openwaterpedia has 32,696 different entries and 70,943 pages of content that are useful for research and reference purposes.

The online resource includes the following entries as of December 2019:

• 19,324 different entries for People in the open water swimming world
• 3,267 different entries for Terms in the open water swimming world
• 3,331 different entries for Places in the open water swimming world
• 1,799 different entries for Products in the open water swimming world
• 378 different entries for Pilots in the open water swimming world
• 979 different entries for Services in the open water swimming world
• 1,570 different entries for Coaches in the open water swimming world
• 793 different entries for Records in the open water swimming world
• 5,280 different entries for Events in the open water swimming world
• 2,963 different entries for Groups/Sites in the open water swimming world

Many people edit and add information to Openwaterpedia, a cumulative total of 533,665 times.

“But, very unfortunately, there is someone – or a small group of people – who are going through the content of Openwaterpedia and changing the information – or deleting information – from tens of 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 Lynne Cox and Kevin Murphy because someone went to their bios and changed the information.  I cannot imagine why anyone would be motivated to do so.

Volunteers – like Ned Denison and Brian Suddeth – who help maintain this resource for the global open water swimming community cannot keep up with the purposeful hacking.  We try, but these people are bent on hacking.

But Daniel Slosberg set about to identify and helped stop this hacking. Slosberg – who did an old-school (i.e., with paddler and no GPS) 64.6 km two-way Catalina Channel crossing in 1978 in 19 hours 32 minutes [shown above] – was extremely helpful and brilliant in his approach. He was able to resolve issues on tens of thousands pages. His sleuthing was incredible and greatly appreciated.”

www.Openwaterpedia.com can be accessed here.

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