Talk:Underwater diving

Merge with Commercial diving

I disagree about merging the 2 articles. Commercial diving, although it's in a poor state right now, has the potential for a good article; the subject is interesting, it's not been covered elsewhere and it's worthwhile.

Underwater diving on the other hand, has an identity crisis with no one understanding what it's for, being in no-mans-land between swimming and scuba and having plenty of competition from more interesting articles about scuba equipment. Mark.murphy 19:04, 31 January 2006 (UTC)

I also agree with this. Comercial Diving has a rich history all its own and should not be merged with Sport Diving. While the two share many common technologies which were pioneered in commercial diving, their practices are completely different. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 24.161.187.201 (talk • contribs) 23:59, 9 February 2006 (UTC)

Underwater diving as opposed to what? As an avid scuba diver who lives in the south paciffic the term "Underwater Diving" is an odd one. The terms most used are SCUBA diving, Free diving, Commercial diving, Reserch diving. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 66.8.148.89 (talk) 03:39, 21 September 2008 (UTC)

I'd say keep them separate. Neither article is that great but they are about significantly different things: Commercial Diving is a highly specialised operation which needs a separate page, but the Underwater diving page is just a general introduction to the whole topic of diving - be it SCUBA, free-diving, commercial or however else. Definitely keep them separate - but cleaning them both up and expanding would be good. If you get time before me then please do it! Iancaddy 00:16, 7 February 2006 (UTC)

I agree to all of Iancaddy's arguments. There ought to be a link from Underwater diving to Commercial diving, but no merging. And as a further suggestion: Underwater diving should be the main article of a Wikiportal. There is one in the german Wikipedia. Open it, enter Portal:Tauchen and have a look. This could be, after all, one good idea coming from Germany ;-) Heinrich L. 20:01, 1 March 2006 (UTC)

These two pages should be kept separate. The underwater diving page should be combined with the scuba diving page. These two pages focus more on the recreational aspects of diving. The commercial diving pages should be on its own, lending to the fact that it is a completely different way of diving. The training, equipment, dive purpose and result of the dive are very different. blobublz 23:00 17 March 2006 (EST)

While I'd agree that it would be more appropriate to merge this article with scuba diving than commercial diving, I don't think there's really anything useful in this article to go into scuba diving. I'd say this article should either be wiped and made into a redirect page, or it should be made into a disambig type page which links to articles like Scuba diving, Freediving, Submersible, etc. -- David Scarlett^(Talk) 23:17, 21 April 2006 (UTC)

Use as introduction to Diving

Relatively little activity since the above discussion, so I have tried to re-write as an introduction to underwater diving. I have separated on equipment used rather than diving activity (sport v professional). I have included links to as many articles as I am aware of and will continue to search for more. Anyone who knows diving on wiki could include more links, but I think this should be a very short article with less than the introductory paragraph of any main page included. There is probably scope for something on training and gases. Finavon 19:13, 10 June 2007 (UTC)

Learning to swim underwater/ basic freediving

• I don't think this section fits on this page. Can it even be written for wiki at all? Finavon 19:25, 10 June 2007 (UTC)
• I moved it to Diving training. Anthony Appleyard 08:13, 12 June 2007 (UTC)

How should that fit with/link to diver training, which starts as a better article, but deteriorates to lists? Finavon 09:19, 12 June 2007 (UTC)

"closed circuit" diving

There seems to be no info about "closed circuit" underwater diving.

Are there any civillian purposes ( or applications ) for this kind of dive ? Thanks: Sju hav (talk) 22:33, 19 November 2008 (UTC)

Request to insert a link for Worldwide Scuba Diving Directory & Map

Hi Divers

I think my resource will be useful for people interested in scuba diving. On my web site - Worldwide Scuba Diving Directory & Map We've combined a map based on Google Map's script and Web Directory. This combination allowes visitors to see information about all diving-related companies registered in the web directory. Because it is the biggest scuba diving related directory on the Web (it shows 5421 businesses but the ammount increases day by day) the map is the most precise and detailed. I've updated Google Map script so the map moves automatically to visitor's geographical point (using visitor's IP address) to make search easier. The web site also includes descriptions of the majority of the world's diving related businesses and organisations. As well as this, we publish diving related news. Please, have a look over the site and let me know what you think.Divingfinder (talk) 02:56, 23 November 2008 (UTC)

SNUBA

besides SNUBA diving, there is also another (similar) type of diving. It also uses a umbilical air hose but the air comes from the vessel (eg pressurized ? not sure on that one) and a completely closed mask (eg diving helmet) is used. I'm guessing that its mostly for deep water diving, but its also used in low depth waters eg for repair work, installing of machines (eg water turbines,...) Look into it and include to article

Suspected violation of copyrights

Part of the article is copied from: Diving the Skafandro suit. Binot (talk) 18:16, 16 October 2009 (UTC)

Thanks for spotting that. I've removed the copyvio text and re-written the section citing that website as a source. --RexxS (talk) 19:38, 16 October 2009 (UTC)

While on this subject, this article claims that sponge divers were down for 5 minutes on breath-hold. I've been told that on record-breaking no-limits freedives the divers are 'only' down for 4 minutes or so. Do we think the 5-minute claim is credible? Other peer-reviewed sources I've seen (sadly forgotten) claim 2–3 minutes down, with 2-minute surface intervals, which sounds much more credible. We shouldn't be repeating dubious claims even if they're in what look like reliable sources. --Wally Tharg (talk) 12:05, 19 September 2012 (UTC)

Diving vs Underwater diving

According to Wiktionary 'diving' is both 2. The sport of jumping head first into water.
and 3. The practice of swimming underwater, especially using a scuba system, and especially for recreation.
So underwater diving is either: 2. underwater jumping into water or 3. underwater swimming underwater
Neither makes any sense. You cannot jump underwater into water and the other is redundant, since the other meaning of diving already includes underwater in it. In rather same way one could talk about racial racism. 85.217.22.47 (talk) 19:33, 3 June 2011 (UTC)

• You are right. It is difficult to justify the article at all since all of the (very little) useful information in it is in Free-diving or Scuba diving or [[snorkelling. The title has always struck me as odd. Suggest we offload any useful informatioon int other articles and then mark it for deletion. Ex nihil ^(talk) 23:36, 5 June 2011 (UTC)

The problem is that this article has incoming links from almost 500 other pages:

• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:WhatLinksHere/Underwater_diving

This is because the linked text diving would link to the sport of jumping into water, so whenever we use 'diving' and wish to wikilink it, we pipe it here like this: [[Underwater diving|diving]]. In other words, this page is the top-level page for the activity of swimming or moving underwater, whether using scuba, surface supply or breath-holding. It would be nice if it were just called Diving, but as that title is already taken by a different activity, it is reasonable to have the disambiguation title Underwater diving in the absence of a better alternative. That is why it is apparently a redundant title. If you delete this article, it will be recreated quite quickly as those 500 red-links will induce editors to fill in the obvious 'missing article'. Feel free to suggest a better title though, if you can agree one.

This article, being 'top-level' is written almost wholly in summary style, but that does not excuse the dismal lack of sources. I would have thought that our efforts would be better spent in improving the article as it stands. --RexxS (talk) 14:58, 6 June 2011 (UTC)

Difficult to improve it in this format because its subsections are so well covered that whatever we write will be redundant. I suggest we check that it really introduces no new information and then reduce it to a disambiguation page. It would be useful as a disambiguation page. This still leaves the problem of a title, either it stays the same or we could try Diving (disambiguation), which is a different subject matter to Dive (disambiguation) but would need a link. Ex nihil ^(talk) 06:40, 7 June 2011 (UTC)

The sport should be "Diving (sport)", or something like that, because diving clearly indicates underwater activity. If I translate the sport's name from Finnish to English, I get swim(ming) jumps and that makes sense (to me at least). 82.141.74.224 (talk) 10:13, 12 November 2011 (UTC)

There are unfortunately two sports called "Diving" in English, so "Diving (sport)" would not distinguish them. This article is called fi:Sukellus in Finnish and the other one is called fi:Uimahypyt. I believe the second one is 'swim-jump', isn't it? --RexxS (talk) 23:32, 12 November 2011 (UTC)

Two sports called diving? I thought the other is either "free-diving" or "scuba diving", and diving would refer generally to what is now called 'underwater diving'. Again, from Wiktionary: diving is either jumping into water or swimming underwater. So this is not "underwater diving", but rather "underwater swimming".

Of the question, "uimahypyt" sure means "swim-jumps" in english. 82.141.93.98 (talk) 00:00, 20 January 2012 (UTC)

Well, all you need to do is persuade the editors at Talk:Diving (i.e. the jumping into water article) to rename their page to "Diving (sport)". Then we could use Diving as the title for this page and remove the "Underwater" part. --RexxS (talk) 00:16, 20 January 2012 (UTC)

And I again did a google image search, and "diving" gives mostly the underwater related while "diving sport" gives the jumping related ones. That supports this point. And I have also written in that talk page about this, but no response yet. 82.141.66.136 (talk) 22:30, 2 February 2012 (UTC)

Until someone comes up with an unambiguous term which includes free diving, scuba diving and surface supplied diving, but excludes diving into the water, this is the best we have, unsatisfactory as it may be. • • • Peter (Southwood) ^(talk): 07:43, 5 August 2012 (UTC)

Major cleanup and focus on topic

I have done a major cleanup and changed a lot of text to focus on the topic of the title, please don't make reverts without discussion, particularly not replacement of trivial items which belong in a more specific article. Cheers, • • • Peter (Southwood) ^(talk): 10:36, 5 August 2012 (UTC)

Cleanup appreciated – a lot better! One thought for the future: under 'Reasons for diving' there's a table that lists the types of apparatus used for each task/reason. Freediving should feature in this table, not just under recreational uses, but practical ones as well. A lot of ship hull inspection is done using freediving, as is much shallow-water scientific work. Also, it's frowned upon (and illegal in some countries I believe) to spear-fish on SCUBA. I'm not an authority on this though as I only do one type of diving. --Wally Tharg (talk) 11:19, 21 September 2012 (UTC)

Go ahead and add for freediving. Just realise that relatively unfamiliar applications are more likely to be challenged for references. You might want to pre-empt the challenges and set a good example by putting them in early. (I could ref pretty much everything in the current table, but almost everything there is common knowledge/uncontroversial, so not worth the trouble until somene asks). Spearfishing is illegal on scuba in South Africa, but I dont know which law, regulation, ordinance or whatever it is specified in. I know several scientific divers who occasionally do breathhold work in shallow water, and yachties who inspect/clean their own boats on snorkel, but don't know of commercial diving on breathhold. Then again, in South Africa, commercial diving is defined as using breathing apparatus, and breathhold is specifically not covered by the diving regulations. No doubt it is different in every jurisdiction. • • • Peter (Southwood) ^(talk): 13:01, 21 September 2012 (UTC)

Peter, will have a think about this one. I think it will be relatively easy to find where fishing on SCUBA is illegal (includes UK and USA I think) but like you the other stuff is 'common knowledge' – marine biologists I've known who freedived, and the fact that the RN used it (in the 1980s at least) for quick preliminary inspections (e.g. is this bent, or do we need to send a welder down?). --Wally Tharg (talk) 20:18, 22 September 2012 (UTC)