I asked for a deletion review of the article on Global Underwater Explorers, as I thought it was inappropriate for a speedy deletion without a formal ADR. It has been suggested that I put reasoning down on the userspace, so I created this page to do.
- Amongst technical diving training organisations, Technical Diving International is clearly the largest and most prevalent. Although there are no reliable statistics available, anecdotally, after TDI the two most prolific organisations in technical diving training are IANTD and GUE (for my anecdote, I am relying on an informal poll conducted recently on an online Scuba diving messageboard - see here).
- It is worth pausing to note that less significant diver training organisations have Wikipedia articles, see for example American Nitrox Divers International. I know two bad arguments don't make a good one, but it does suggest a reasonable discussion should be had.
- It is also worth noting the number of Wikipedia redlinks that point to a Global Underwater Explorers article: Special:WhatLinksHere/Global_Underwater_Explorers. It is not a vast number, but enough to show that the authors of other articles expect it to be there, or to be created one day.
- Apart from its size, GUE has greater that normal significance within the diving community because of its controversial "DIR" philosophy. Although the DIR concept has been extremely divisive within the technical diving community, it has unquestionably had a significant impact on technical diving thinking.
- Unlike many technical diving training organisations, GUE is not limited solely in its remit to diver training. It is also involed in scientific research and regional mapping projects.
- On the deletion review it was mentioned that GUE was a local body; I am not sure that is correct (although I am truthfully not an expert). I know I grew out of the Florida cave diving community, but a quick Google search reveals that there are now GUE instructors training divers as far afield as Mexico and Australia.
- In terms of third party notability, I did a few searches amongst diving magazines (those that allow you to search for content online) for GUE and DIR, and I attach links below:
I'll try and put some more stuff in as I come across it.
--Legis (talk - contribs) 17:46, 21 September 2008 (UTC)
Not a secondary source, but I went through the GUE's course listings on www.gue.com for their introductory (DIRF) course, and found that in the past year they had listed 216 courses in 36 different countries including US, UK, Sweden, Norway, Italy and Australia each with more than 10 classes. The actual number of courses is probably less than that since some of the courses were probably canceled and I don't have the time to go through all 216 courses and determine their final status. That is at least objectively verifiable and the course listings database is much more NPOV than a press release. It should be at least sufficient to establish that GUE is notable outside of florida.
--Lamontcg (talk) 17:48, 23 September 2008 (UTC)
Not for profit dive teams/clubs that have GUE certification as a standard (urls point to pages that hold their standards that reference GUE):
- [1] NWUE (Pacific NW, US)
- [2] SCRET (Pacific NW, US)
- [3] Ocean-Discovery (Sweden?)
- [4] NEUE (NE Atlantic, US)
- [5] BAUE (California, US)
==Lamontcg (talk) 17:57, 23 September 2008 (UTC)