Sounding the archive…
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LoadingDiver Archives is built on authoritative, openly licensed public data. We normalize it into a single model, record the provenance of every record, and honor the attribution and share-alike obligations of the sources we stand on.
Raw factual data — coordinates, depths — is not copyrightable. But the compilations and descriptions around it can be, and the licenses that govern them deserve respect.
So we keep our licensing discipline in the open. Below is every source the archive draws on, the license it carries, how we attribute it, and exactly what we use it for. On any individual record, the same provenance appears in the Sources & provenance panel — so a fact is always traceable back to where it came from.
The authoritative spine for shipwrecks and charted obstructions — position, depth context, navigational-hazard flags, and brief descriptive detail in U.S. waters.
U.S. Government work — no copyright. Synthesized from the Automated Wreck and Obstruction Information System (AWOIS) and NOAA Electronic Navigational Charts.
NOAA Office of Coast Survey ↗Base coverage for dive-site locations and names worldwide, plus geographic context used to place and label records.
© OpenStreetMap contributors. Used under the Open Database License (ODbL) — attribution and share-alike obligations apply to the database and derived works.
openstreetmap.org/copyright ↗Historical and descriptive context — vessel histories, the story of a wreck or reef, and cross-references that enrich a record beyond raw coordinates.
Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License. Adapted summaries are attributed inline on each record they appear on.
CC BY-SA 4.0 ↗GPS positions and deployment detail for artificial reefs and intentionally sunk vessels, where states publish them openly.
Many U.S. states publish artificial-reef and deployed-wreck GPS coordinates and details. Terms are confirmed per state before inclusion.
Data.gov ↗The depth layer over time — corrected depths, difficulty, entry type, marine life, conditions, and new sites the public datasets miss.
Submitted under clear, assignable contributor terms with consent captured at submission. Every edit passes a moderation queue before publication.
Contribute to the archive →Each source speaks its own dialect — an AWOIS feature, an OSM node, a Wikidata Q-item. We map them all into a single registry record: name, coordinates, region, type, depth, difficulty, marine life, history, and conditions. The same shape everywhere means the same clean page everywhere, regardless of where a fact originated.
We never strip a fact from its origin. Every record stores the sources that contributed to it — the machine id, a human label, a stable reference, the canonical URL, and the license code. That provenance is rendered on the page, so data quality and attribution stay auditable for readers and contributors alike.
Each record carries a 0–100 completeness score reflecting how much verified, useful data it holds — coordinates plus depth, type, description, imagery, and conditions all push it higher. The score is what lets us tell a rich, finished entry from a bare stub.
This is the policy that protects the whole archive. A page is only eligible for our public sitemap once its completeness reaches 45 (SITEMAP_COMPLETENESS_THRESHOLD). Below that bar a record still has a real, readable page — with verified coordinates and core facts — but it is deliberately marked noindex and withheld from the sitemap until it earns its place.
A smaller set of complete, rich pages outperforms a huge set of thin stubs. So we never ship auto-generated filler into search. Of the 3,821 records in the archive, 2,330 (61%) currently meet the bar and are indexable; the remaining 1.5K are visible, citable, and waiting on detail.
A corrected depth, a missing source, a better description — every reviewed contribution pushes a stub toward the index and makes the archive more trustworthy.