WikiClimb aims to provide the climbing community with a central repository of climbing-related information contributed by the community itself.

The motivation behind the project is twofold:

• Make information easier to access.
• Improve the existing interfaces to visualize it.

Free continued access to content generated by the community will be guaranteed by licensing it under a CC BY-SA 4.0 license. Potential contributions will be encouraged using public repositories with open licensing.

All contributions are welcome, some ideas to get you started

• Contribute content directly from the app, we are trying to grow our kwnoledge base on areas, routes and geolocation data.
• Contribute translations of existing content. Currently the translation engine has not been developed, you will need to manually submit the translations to us and we can upload them.
• Contribute code, create new applications that use the existing content or improve the existing ones. Contributed code needs to be throughly tested.

There is a good number of ways to access climbing information, from traditional paper guidebooks to online platforms to asking a friend on WhatsApp. Why do we need yet another one?

We need WikiClimb because all the existing ways have bad shortcomings that make them inadequate to the task, and the more effort we put into them, the more information that gets trapped in one format, or platform, and becomes inaccessible at a later point.

When guidebook authors devote their time and effort to write a guidebook for an area, that information becomes unavailable to be searched, or utilized, through digital means. When community members decide to donate some of their time to input data into one of the existing digital platforms, they do it out of a desire to make that information available to as many fellow climbers as possible.

Some of the platforms we have seen pretend to do just so but, in reality, they are just trying to turn a profit on, which is not a negative thing on itself, but it becomes so when, in the interest of gaining that profit, they restrict access to the information to be available only through the tools they provide themselves.

This is against the greater good of the community, as it prevents third parties from creating tools that may help us visualize, analyze, or otherwise use the information making it more useful.

Other platforms are genuinely interested in promoting access to information and freely offer access to their data, but none of them has gained enough traction to be a significant player on the scene.

WikiClimb aims to fill that void through a combination of good licensing, tooling and a simple, and highly usable end user interface.