[ Pitlamp - I totally accept your point that the most active exploratory cavers are likely to be the best at recording things. ]
For information, availability, ease of use, searching, free, longevity and just about anything else, the wikipedia model is hard to beat.
It would be FAR better if the info on Wrecksite was on wikipedia instead. It's essentially the same, but open and 'free'.
It does however go back to my earlier point that not everyone is a 'journalist'. With facebook et. al. we are in a position where there's less formal recording happening, but a lot more postings, updates and particularly photos of caving activity. To be blunt, a lot of this is purely motivated by folks addicted to the mini-endorphin rush of a 'like' - an active and immediate sense of acknowledgment by their peers. These likes are coming not just from cavers, but it exposes caving to people who aren't currently cavers.
Here's a real life example. What's people's thoughts on the best way to publish this :
We've been surveying a underwater cave in France, St Georges. A relatively popular site, multiple divers visiting most days of the year. I'd say most cave divers visiting the area for a week long trip would include it in their itinerary, say one of the 20 most popular in France. The aim of project was to improve what was available and make it available for divers to use.
Once we had something worthy of publishing, it wasn't immediately obvious what to do with it(!). As divers we are not a club, we don't have a journal. We are not involved with the CDG. We didn't really want to have to build and maintain a website just to host a couple of documents. We sent copies out to the local dive centres, Oli& Harold. We sent a copy to plongee-sout, and it's hidden away in there somewhere.
What really did work was starting a facebook group for the project. We now have 360 people who follow the group, mostly international and we do check they are actually divers to avoid spam. It's very easy to find and they can just download whatever survey they need, even without joining the group. We get regular vis & line condition reports & photos posted. If there's a problem with access, parking, litter or something similar, it gets posted up there. If we update the survey, all these people immediately get notified.
Could or should we have done something different? What other platform exists that can share information, and feedback, so easily to an international audience?