About Libre Aquatics Wiki

Libre Aquatics Wiki is a free reference for the equipment, timing hardware, and meet operations behind competitive aquatics: swimming, diving, water polo, artistic swimming, and open water. Its text is published under the CC BY-SA 4.0 licence, so anyone may reuse and adapt it on the same terms. It is facility-neutral: written to be useful at any pool or venue, not tied to a single institution.

The focus is operations (how competitions are run) rather than coaching, training, or sport history.

Scope¶

The wiki covers the equipment and procedures used to stage a competition:

• In scope: timing hardware and consoles, start systems, touchpads and other lane hardware, the vendors that make it, and the meet- and team-management work of entering, seeding, scoring, and publishing an event, across swimming, diving, water polo, artistic swimming, and open water.
• Out of scope: coaching and training, stroke technique, athlete or team histories, and record-keeping. Those are covered well elsewhere; this reference does not duplicate them.

Pages describe how equipment and procedures work in general, not how any one pool or organization has chosen to set them up.

The Libre Aquatics project¶

Libre Aquatics Wiki is one part of Libre Aquatics, a family of open-source tools for aquatic sports:

• Libre Aquatics Meet: meet-management software.
• Libre Aquatics Team: team- and roster-management software.
• Libre Aquatics Wiki, this reference, documenting the systems the software works with.

Libre means free, as in free and open, the sense used in “free/libre software”.

How the wiki is organized¶

The wiki is organized around the equipment and operations of running a competition:

• Equipment, the catalog of hardware, grouped by role (timers, start systems, touchpads, pushbuttons, and more) and by discipline, with a common equipment section for gear shared across sports.
• Meet management and team management, the operations of planning, seeding, scoring, and publishing an event, and the Libre Aquatics software built for them.
• The vendors that make the equipment.

Every article is tagged by its sport(s) and topic(s), so a page is reachable from both its sport and its subject. The full tag index is on the Categories page.

Naming and images¶

Products and companies are named nominatively, to identify the equipment a page describes, without implying any endorsement. The wiki does not reproduce vendor logos or host vendor manuals; it links each source at the publisher instead. Infoboxes are text-only, and any image must be original or cleared for reuse, credited, and licensed. The full policy is on the Sources & citations page.

Contributing¶

Libre Aquatics Wiki is written as plain Markdown in a public Git repository and built with Astro. Anyone can propose an edit or a new article. Most of the wiki is still to be written: the overview pages set the structure, and leaf articles (specific roles, events, rules, and equipment) are filled in over time.

A new article is a Markdown file under the matching section of docs/, with front matter giving its title and tags, registered in the site navigation. Articles follow a consistent shape: a lead paragraph, topical sections, any specifications or details, a “See also” list, and cited references. They are written in a plain, neutral tone. Claims are backed by sources: primary documents such as vendor manuals and governing-body rules, corroborated by independent reporting, and cited as footnotes.

The full contributor guide, covering sourcing standards, house style, and how to add a page, lives in CONTRIBUTING.md in the wiki’s repository. See Sources & citations for how the wiki references vendor manuals and rulebooks.

Corrections are welcome from anyone who works with this equipment, including on points the manuals get wrong. Open an issue on the repository, or email info@libreaquatics.org.