Talk:Geography of Switzerland

Orphaned references in Geography of Switzerland
I check pages listed in Category:Pages with incorrect ref formatting to try to fix reference errors. One of the things I do is look for content for orphaned references in wikilinked articles. I have found content for some of Geography of Switzerland's orphans, the problem is that I found more than one version. I can't determine which (if any) is correct for this article, so I am asking for a sentient editor to look it over and copy the correct ref content into this article.

Reference named "CIA": From Geography of Germany: Germany CIA Factbook. November 14, 2006. Retrieved 2006, 11-29. From Liechtenstein: CIA World Factbook (link) From Geography of Serbia: CIA World Factbook:Serbia From Germany: Germany CIA Factbook. November 14, 2006. Retrieved 2006, 11-29. From Geography of Greece: CIA World Fact Book,  

I apologize if any of the above are effectively identical; I am just a simple computer program, so I can't determine whether minor differences are significant or not. AnomieBOT ⚡ 23:14, 2 December 2008 (UTC)
 * Cleaned up Tobyc75 (talk) 00:02, 3 December 2008 (UTC)

Districts of Switzerland
Proposal to rename the articles about individual districts at Talk:Districts of Switzerland TrueColour (talk) 21:15, 26 October 2009 (UTC)

Switzerland as part of Western Europe?
I don't really have the (outside) sources to back that up but as a Swiss, I can tell from my own experience that the Swiss always refer to Switzerland as being "Central European". In fact, I haven't ever heard any Swiss refer to Switzerland as being part of a "Western European" region of Europe. When the term "Western European" is used by the Swiss to refer to the country, it is always used in a broad sense exclusively; i.e. as a cold war coined term to label the western, democratic and capitalistic half of Europe (rather than a much narrower region).

Usage of geographic terms varies somewhat with lingustic and national traditions and I suspect that the notion of Switzerland being "Western European" is mainly used by people from English speaking countries (especiall the UK and USA). Leastways up to now, I only came across that notion when reading English texts.

As a source for my observations, I can however only point to the German Wikipedia entries on related articles such as on Switzerland, Central Europe, etc. In these, Switzerland is in general always referred to as "Central European", both in text and on the maps. This is even the case in the English entry on "Central Europe!

Furthermore, the notion of "Central Europe" (German: "Mitteleuropa") was in its origin first developed in 19th century German political literature and was later used in geography proper. In these early geographical usages, Switzerland was already considered part of a "Central European" region of Europe. In Wikipedia, this can be seen in the historical maps from 1901 on the German entry on Central Europe.

As for the UN regional grouping, I wouldn't consider this as of any value in a geographic discussion since it is by definition no scholary geographic but rather an internal political grouping for use within the UN. As a matter of fact, I have no idea how the rather strange (my opinion) grouping used by the UN came about; I guess only few people in Europe actually are O.K. with this grouping. To name just one further example, contrary to common everyday use this grouping adds the Baltic and the Bristish Isles to "Northern Europe" which is the broadest possible use for the term and according to my observation only rarely used in everyday life.

For these reasons, I would strongly suggest correcting the article accordingly.

83.76.157.53 (talk) 22:22, 27 August 2010 (UTC)


 * Fair enough. I will edit the article as such 1brettsnyder (talk) 21:58, 1 September 2010 (UTC)

Cannot be used
The article originally said:


 * About one-fourth (25.5%) of the country is either mountains, lakes or rivers and can not be used.

The idea that the Swiss can not use their mountains, lakes or rivers is bizarre in the extreme. Not least because they are key to their tourist industry, which must be a pretty big portion of their GDP. Then there is hydro-electricity and commercial fisheries. I suspect this might be a misunderstanding or over-simplistic translation of a source. Unfortunately I couldn't find anything related to usage of mountains, lakes and rivers in the actual quoted source (http://www.bfs.admin.ch/bfs/portal/de/index/themen/02/01/pan.html).

I've therefore changed the article to read:


 * About one-fourth (25.5%) of the country is either mountains, lakes or rivers and is categorised as unproductive.

which I think is more supportable; and added a source that does support it. -- chris_j_wood (talk) 17:20, 8 September 2012 (UTC)


 * You're absolutely right (don't remember why I wrote that). Thank you for the correction. mge o  talk 20:30, 10 September 2012 (UTC)

Conversion of temperature increments
The "Climate" section contains this sentence: "Ticino, on the south side of the Alps, has sub-tropical vegetation and is usually 2–4 °C (36–39 °F) warmer, and wetter than the Swiss Plateau."

Those numbers are not absolute temperatures but rather increments, so they should be converted in relative terms. The Template:Convert includes a "change" attribute for temperature differences, so I added that to the "convert" call. Teknico (talk) 07:53, 16 October 2014 (UTC)

External links modified
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I have just modified 3 external links on Geography of Switzerland. Please take a moment to review my edit. If you have any questions, or need the bot to ignore the links, or the page altogether, please visit this simple FaQ for additional information. I made the following changes:
 * Added archive https://web.archive.org/web/20080409212805/http://www.bfs.admin.ch/bfs/portal/de/index/regionen/thematische_karten/maps/bevoelkerung/bevoelkerungsstand/0/bevoelkerungsstand.parsys.0003.PhotogalleryDownloadFile2.tmp/k01.62s.pdf to http://www.bfs.admin.ch/bfs/portal/de/index/regionen/thematische_karten/maps/bevoelkerung/bevoelkerungsstand/0/bevoelkerungsstand.parsys.0003.PhotogalleryDownloadFile2.tmp/k01.62s.pdf
 * Added archive https://web.archive.org/web/20090725063713/http://www.bfs.admin.ch/bfs/portal/de/index/themen/02/03/blank/key/01/zustand_und_entwicklung__tabelle.html to http://www.bfs.admin.ch/bfs/portal/de/index/themen/02/03/blank/key/01/zustand_und_entwicklung__tabelle.html
 * Added archive https://web.archive.org/web/20141020021751/http://www.swisstopo.admin.ch/internet/swisstopo/en/home/topics/survey/border.html to http://www.swisstopo.admin.ch/internet/swisstopo/en/home/topics/survey/border.html

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More succinct?
Does anyone really need this amount of detail about a 15,000 sq. mile country? — Preceding unsigned comment added by 2601:346:580:1FD0:3941:2CDD:8599:D4B4 (talk) 21:44, 18 May 2020 (UTC)