Talk:Ural Mountains

Old text
Naming convention: isn't it more usual to wirte "Ural Mountains" ? Why create the link Uralskiy Khrebet instead of Uralskiy khrebet, by the same principle? --Anon


 * Good question. The wikipedia naming convention is to not captitalize second, third, fourth, etc. words if they are not always capitalized in grammatically correct English. As for the Russian name, that was me playing around -- I don't foresee anyone linking to either Uralskiy Khrebet or Uralskiy khrebet within an article within the English wikipedia. --maveric149

It seems like it could be argued either way, so given a redirect it makes no great difference. It's no harder than deciding the "right" spelling of Mohammed, civilisation or honor: the person who creates the article should get to choose (I did create Ural Mountains BTW but I don't care enough to change it back, given the redirect :-) --Anon


 * Its not as simple as that -- the reason why we have naming conventions is to reduce the amount of duplicated effort. For example, the page titled Ural mountains did not exist before I created it -- even as a redirect. It was only after I created this naming convention compliant page that I found that another stub existed at Ural Mountains. Most others would not have checked. See the section about this in naming conventions. Redirects are useful, but shouldn't have to be made for every variation in capitalization each time an article is made. Cheers! --maveric149, Sunday, April 28, 2002

Hmm, I've added and "when all else fails" section to the naming conventions. Please take a look and see if you agree. --Anon.

I had another thought about this: "Ural mountains" seems incorrect, since either "mountains" is a disambiguation, in which case it should be "Ural (mountains)", or mountains is part of the name of the place, in which case it should be "Ural Mountains". --Anon.


 * Now that's silly. English speakers do not call the Urals Ural so the use of a parenthetical name would be counter intuitive. The range is best known as the Ural Mountains -- however, since the "m" is not always capitalized, then, per wikipedia naming conventions it should be lowercase for the main article. The term Urals is less clear and therefore inferior to the two word name. --maveric149

Yes, Ural (mountains) would be silly. But in English it's normal to capitalize placenames: hence Ural Mountains is the more correct version and Ural mountains should be the redirect. --Anon.

It seems to me the Wikipedia naming convention is either wrong or is being applied here where it isn't applicable --Anon.

The motivation behind the rule was to instill in the minds of contributers to "when in doubt don't use capitals". There is a very strong tendency in many (if not most) newbies to capitalize everything. The reason is understandable -- the text at the top of the page is the title of the page and titles are capitalized in English. Makes sense. However, this is a wiki, and the whole point of a wiki is to make linking easy and second nature (see naming conventions) and not to either force people to use pipes so that direct links can be made to an article or have Improperaly and Odly Capitalized Words Within the Text of an Article (see naming conventions). Place names, perhaps, should have a separate convention. But then you would have to capitalize such things as Manzanar Japanese internment camp to Manzanar Japanese Internment Camp, which improperly gives the impression that the wording of "Internment Camp" is part of a proper name of the place. In fact the proper name of the place is "Manzanar National Historic Landmark". The current name of the article reflects what most English speakers would expect the article to be named and therefore would be the most likely candidate to be directly linked to in another article without much effort or knowledge. --maveric149


 * I think all this should be spelled out in the naming convention then, e.g., all place names are lower-cased even if it would require writing grammatically incorrect sentences to link (there's a note there pointing to further discussion but the link is broken).  So the example above will be Manzanar national historic landmark or Manzanar japanese internment camp.  -- Anon.

One would never have the word Japanese be lower case. And the historic landmark title is the proper name given to it by the Park Service. --maveric149

Looks like the "pages that link here" of redirects will soon be part of the "pages that link here" for the target of the redirects -- therefore it is no longer necessary to be so absolutist about the lowercase naming convention. This rule should probably be updated to say "most common capitalization seen in the body of most English text". --maveric149, Friday, May 3, 2002

Others
The words concluding this article seem suspiscious to me--there really is a section of the Urals called the Crappy urals? Is this a linguistic thing that is really name like that or did somebody just decide to come along and add that inconspicuously as a joke? Can someone verify this?


 * Turns out it was a bit of vandalism that managed to slip under the radar. Someone replaced "Subarctic" with "Crappy" on the 20th. I've reverted the change; you can see both edits under this article's page history. To learn how to revert vandalism yourself, see How to revert a page to an earlier version. Cheers, – Hadal 03:05, 29 Apr 2004 (UTC)

Can someone add to this, I've heard things about radioactive waste being sent there and stuff, and yet this article makes no mention of it...

"It is a mountain range with a very well recognized name." What the--? Atario 18:45, 5 February 2007 (UTC)

What about nuclear waste in the Ural Mountains?--89.160.136.166 (talk) 20:37, 19 April 2009 (UTC)

There aint verifiliability
"the Riphean Mountains in Greco-Roman antiquity" I tried to find this in Spanish... After all, "Riphean" is just a transliteration into the English alphabet of the Greek way to name them and "mountains" a translation... The same shall exist for Spanish... But I found no single answer to this intrigue... Said that, there are few pages in English that second this... Most are wikipedia's mirrors... So... Is there any reliable proof to this?Undead Herle King (talk) 15:13, 18 December 2007 (UTC)

Map, please
Article would benefit from a map. -- 189.60.73.240 (talk) 03:29, 23 June 2010 (UTC)

Although there are now two maps in the article, in none of them is the location of the mountains clear. For example, the map on the top does not have the name of the mountains written explicitly. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 194.117.40.134 (talk) 10:17, 29 March 2011 (UTC)



Fauna and flora pictures
The pics were taken very far from the Urals, in some cases in Canada, therefore I doubt that it is encyclopedic to keep them in this article without further comments, they don't show us the Urals after all, and may well depict uncharacteristic surrounding vegetation, rocks, soil, or wrong subspecies of the plants and animals. Now, most importantly, Spermophilus citellus, for instance, doesn't occur anywhere near the Urals at all. Spermophilus major does, but even it occurs in the most periperal parts of the range. Please be more careful with such matters. Colchicum (talk) 09:29, 12 July 2010 (UTC)
 * Valid point, which I'll try to fix (we don't have many fauna pictures from that area). There is no Spermophilus major in the article, you probably mean "gopher" and/or "suslik". They are indeed common only to the southern steppes, but the gallery doesn't say "most representative species". Materialscientist (talk) 09:45, 12 July 2010 (UTC)
 * Well, I mean the picture of the souslik that is used here is that of S. citellus, which is wrong. It should be another souslik. Colchicum (talk) 09:49, 12 July 2010 (UTC)

Image and/or map
As has been mentioned above, this needs a map or a proper illustration. The lead image is wholly unsuitable... --78.101.62.79 (talk) 09:19, 28 December 2010 (UTC)

Edit warring on spelling
(i) Per WP:RETAIN, I believe the article should be kept in US spelling, which was here and kept after a major expansion here. Please discuss this issue before reverting - an argument "this is European topic" is irrelevant - the topic is of global importance. (ii) I believe both ".. mountains are a range" and ".. mountains is a range" are correct. Encyclopedia Britannica uses plural for a similar case - the Altai Mountains. Materialscientist (talk) 01:06, 13 February 2011 (UTC)
 * Semiprotected for 2 weeks - hopefully the anon will discuss. Vsmith (talk) 13:34, 13 February 2011 (UTC)

Pliny and the Riphean Range
"In Greco-Roman antiquity, Pliny the Elder thought that the Urals correspond to the Riphean Mountains mentioned by various authors, including Arabic sources of the 10th century". This is both incoherent and vague, and the references (inserted long after the fact) are to two books two hundred years old which don't seem to have anything to do with neither geography nor classical scholarship. Pliny couldn't have "thought that the Urals correspond to the Riphean Mountains", the name "Urals" and the awareness of them as a mountain range with a specific location belong to a much later age than antiquity. And if the name Ripheans had been picked up by Pliny (he may well be using it, but without any precise localization: do you think Pliny has a clear idea of the topography of what we know as the Volga basin?) how could he have borrowed it from Arab travellers living nearly a thousand years later?? I can see what the sentence might be trying to say but that inferred meaning is too vague anyway: we have no proof at all that the ancients knew of the mountain range in question in any precise way. Deleting it.

Geographic significance
So many other WP articles cite the Ural Mountains as being the Eastern border of Europe but I can't find any history of this point of view, whether it is older (pre-19th century) viewpoint or reflects a recent understanding of the continental boundaries. It would be very useful if some mention was made of the importance of the Ural Mountains in dividing the East from the West, particularly when this opinion arose. Liz Read! Talk! 17:40, 21 November 2013 (UTC)

Assessment comment
Substituted at 09:42, 30 April 2016 (UTC)

List of peaks....
The article for ANY article on a mountain range (thousands of miles long) ought to include at least a short list (maybe five) of its highest peaks. One peak is absolutely not enough.47.215.180.7 (talk) 18:12, 23 February 2018 (UTC)

Tourism???
How come there's no information on tourism? Being the only mountain range in an extremely vast area, the Ural Mountains are for sure popular with tourists of all sorts! Someone please add information about major tourism centers and popular activities (hiking? climbing? skiing? river rafting?). Thanks Johnnyjanko (talk) 09:01, 27 June 2018 (UTC)

Trans-Ural region?
We have a red link Trans-Ural region (Trans-Ural Region). Is it a definable concept? If not, then the redirect should be done or red links to be unlinked Estopedist1 (talk) 08:27, 8 February 2023 (UTC)

General map needed
How on earth is this article missing a general Eurasian map showing where on the planet this is in relation to major land areas? Even the "Britannica Kids" website gets that right. :-) 2001:5A8:4260:3100:30CA:BBBF:F541:1A76 (talk) 13:18, 12 March 2024 (UTC)

Claims of extreme age for Mount Karandash
Could we please have a section that addresses locals' claims of extreme age of Mount Karandash (aka Pencil Mountain) in the Urals? Some are now claiming 4.2 million years, which would make it the oldest in the world. Greg Lovern (talk) 09:04, 28 March 2024 (UTC)