Editorial Policy

What gets published

A page ships when it answers a genuine diver question and clears the internal quality gate — completeness, sourcing, unique prose, honest gaps. We would rather publish 500 pages a diver can trust than 5,000 that read like a mail merge. Nothing is published to chase a keyword.

Honesty rules

Ranges instead of false precision; confidence labels on every entity; empty fields shown as "not yet verified" rather than filled with plausible inventions; closures and restrictions stated first; war-grave wrecks treated as memorials; safety topics kept inside mainstream agency and DAN teaching. Superlatives are earned by data or not used.

News standards

News items are real articles from reputable publishers, always credited and linked out; we never rewrite reporting as our own, and we show an empty state rather than filler when feeds are quiet. In-house data briefs are AI-assisted, generated from the atlas's own data, and always labeled as such — they are analysis of our data, never presented as journalism.

AI assistance

AI tools assist research, drafting and compilation under the rules above; sources and confidence labels apply to the result regardless of how it was drafted. AI-generated imagery is labeled wherever it appears.

Independence

No operator, resort, liveaboard, brand or agency has paid for coverage, placement or ranking. Business profiles are unclaimed factual listings; businesses may request corrections but not flattery. If affiliate links are ever introduced, they will be disclosed on the pages where they appear and will never reorder editorial judgments.

Corrections

Errors reported via the contact page are checked against primary sources; confirmed corrections are applied to the database (so every page reflecting that fact updates), and materially significant corrections are noted on the affected page. The fastest way to improve this atlas is to tell us where it is wrong.