Talk:Three-thousander

Spain
I removed the following sentence a few weeks ago:
 * Spain is the only non-Alpine country in Europe with three-thousanders - if one excludes Russia and Turkey and the colonies of European states.

Since the removal was reverted, I would like to explain it in more details than allowed by the edit summary. My main objection is that the conditions listed are so arbitrary as to make the remark completely uninteresting. Basically, it states that Spain is the only country in Europe with mountains over 3000m save for all other countries with such mountains. To exclude half a dozen other countries with three-thousanders, you need to make distinctions according to the mountain range (why?) and then adopt some contrived definition of Europe (by the way, why not explicitly exclude Georgia or even Armenia while we are at it?).

At the same time, the sentence does not include any new information and follows directly from other facts listed earlier in the article, namely that mountains over 3000m are found in the Caucasus, the Alps, the Pyrenees and the Sierra Nevada. In the unlikely event that someone should be interested in knowing which European country apart from Russia, Turkey, France, Italy, Switzerland, and Austria has a summit over 3000m, they can surely figure it out themselves using this article or perhaps list of highest points of European countries as would readers interested in any other arbitrary combinations of countries (why not list the countries where some latin language is spoken, or with more than x% of their territory in the Alps, or only landlocked countries, or perhaps countries situated partly or entirely this side or that side of a watershed?) and definition of Europe (say including Georgia, Armenia and Russia but not Turkey according to some cultural criteria, or everything with some territory West of the main Caucasus ridge but not Armenia or perhaps only Western Europe but including oversea territories, or any country with territory West of the Ural river – which even includes Kazakhstan !). The combinations really are endless…

Additionally, the notion that oversea territories (including, incidentally, Tenerife) are “colonies” is highly objectionable and another example of the need to add arbitrary qualifiers to make the statement hold. It also implies that some mountains are actually higher without naming them (I am guessing what is meant here is Greenland but I am not even sure), which amounts to withholding information for the sake of being able to write that Spain is the “only” something. If anything, it would be much more interesting to list these non-European dependencies and their highest points rather than devote so much effort to making one country exceptional in some way while providing zero additional knowledge.

Finally, while not technically incorrect, the sentence is highly misleading in that it could easily lead readers to believe that all other three-thousanders are either in the Alps or in Eastern Europe, which is not true as there are several summits over 3000m in other parts of France – admittedly an Alpine country – than the French Alps (specifically in the Pyrenees and in Réunion).

This is obviously a minor detail but I do believe that such a contrived bit of trivia should better be removed from the article. GL (talk) 12:29, 26 September 2012 (UTC)