anki-geo / ultimate-geography

Geography flashcard deck for Anki
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An opportunity to address a gap in Anki decks: mountain ranges #606

Open crimsonnugget opened 1 year ago

crimsonnugget commented 1 year ago

I would be inclined to say mountain ranges are as much part of basic geography as are oceans, seas and major rivers. So the suggestion is about adding mountain ranges to the deck, or at least starting by the major ones.

I saw some comments about adding mountain ranges to the deck, but I think none mention one of the biggest arguments: there currently exists no Anki deck for mountain ranges. I think that an ULTIMATE geography deck could easily fill in this gap in decks.

aplaice commented 1 year ago

TBH I'd also love to have mountain ranges in AUG! Do you have any suggestions on which mountain ranges we should include (ideally via some set of objective criteria)?

ellingtonjp commented 12 months ago

This is a great idea. Wikipedia lists of the top 13 by height:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mountain_ranges

Could be a good place to start. Height would also be easy criteria and easy to expand on, ie all ranges > 4000m for example).

ErinSolstice commented 10 months ago

Going solely based off of a single height metric would preclude a lot of locally important mountain ranges. Maybe a lower height cutoff could be chosen and instead cap it at a certain number per region to keep the number of cards within a reasonable limit.

Elevation vs prominence would also be important to consider. Including length as a consideration might also be worthwhile.

ohare93 commented 10 months ago

Seems like a good time to mention the tallest mountain in Denmark, known as Sky Mountain! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Himmelbjerget It stands at an awe inspiring... 147 m (482 ft) 🙈 🤣 Denmark is a pancake

But that's the issue with this deck: tailoring it for individuals is difficult 😞 sure it'd be good to know about Sky Mountain when one lives in Denmark, and each country has their own interesting mountains, natural phenomenon, and landmarks. But someone anywhere else is surely not interested 😄

aplaice commented 10 months ago

Seems like a good time to mention the tallest mountain in Denmark, known as Sky Mountain! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Himmelbjerget It stands at an awe inspiring... 147 m (482 ft) 🙈 🤣 Denmark is a pancake

That's a very deceptive name! :)


I think that the point wasn't to include every country's mountains, but something more like (say) include the tallest/longest/most prominent mountain range(s) of each continent (in addition to the global ranking). Otherwise, if we went with just global height, we'd end up with almost only half-a-dozen ranges near the Himalayas and a couple of others.

If we use length in addition to height, then continental ranking in addition to global ranking might not be as crucial, but maybe still valuable?

(Prominence is rather tricky to determine, for a mountain range, I think, even if it'd be useful.)


One other issue is how do we consider mountain ranges that are subsets of each other — e.g. Ring of Fire vs. American Cordillera vs. North American Cordillera vs. Rocky Mountains vs. Sangre de Cristo Mountains?

To some extent, we had the same issue with sea bodies (e.g. Atlantic Ocean vs. Celtic Sea or Mediterranean vs. Aegean vs. Sea of Crete), but there we had the IHO helping us out, with its simple-ish ~two-level categorisation; also, I don't think that the "nesting" was quite as bad to begin with. There doesn't seem to be any "International Orographic Organisation". :(