Discussion: Proposal for new macroregional subdivision in Poland

Proposal for new macroregional subdivision in Poland

There is currently a mixed approach with formatting top-level regional subdivisions in Poland, where some regions are set on a physico-geographical basis (the Beskids and Polish Jura), and others are set simply as voivodeships.

In my opinion it would be better if everything was based around one system, as it would reduce clutter and be more consistent.

My proposal is to format it as follows:

1. Pojezierza i Pobrzeża (Polish Lake Districts and Coastlands)

2. Niziny (Polish Lowlands)

3. Wyżyny (Polish Uplands)

4. Region Karpacki (Carpathian Region)

5. Sudety (Polish Sudetes)

These regions could later be subdivided depending on necessity. Tell me what you think!

Hey Sviatoslav, I agree it's a total mess, but doing this in Poland is tricky. You have one area, Jura, clearly dominating - and most of Poland doesn't have any natural climbing at all. So perhaps a hybrid system makes sense.

In my opinion the key thing is to have places under one guidebook (e.g. Beskidy or Jura) to be in the same area, and not split. And from your proposal it's hard to imagine that working without seeing it on a map. My idea would be to leave distinct places as main areas (Jura, Beskid, Tatry, Sudety) and the rest named after nearby cities. Here is is on the map: https://i.imgur.com/UawhWeo.png (Cities with climbing gyms only would also get their city specific area)

Thanks for replying!

There are multiple problems with having places named after nearby cities.

First of all - who will decide where one city ends and another starts?

If we use counties - they will quickly add up to a huge number, and it would be strange to have for example Powiat Radomski with one climbing gym on the same level of categorisation as Jura with more than 10000 climbing routes.

If we use voivodeships - what would you do about those which are mostly covered by physico-geographical regions? Would you make an area called "Małopolskie voivodeship excluding Jura, Beskid Mountains and Carpathian Foothills" just to add 4 climbing gyms? I don't think so... At the same time, you wouldn't put those gyms in the top country level, and it would be confusing if the physico-geographical regions were expanded way beyond their actual reach.

A system using both voivodeships and counties on the top level is also an option, but it would probably be way too confusing to use.

To conclude, I don't see how such a mixed system could be be consistent or sustainable.

Okay, you have a good point, the only thing I disagree with is your thinking that all regions on the same level should be equal in terms of number of climbing opportunities - it will never be like that unfortunately, especially in Poland it's going to be imbalanced.

Can you share on a map your vision with the 5 regions, like I did? Perhaps another option would be to just go with super simplistic North / South / West like this map shows https://deih43ym53wif.cloudfront.net/large_area-map-of-poland_9d2510ae94.png

Here is a rough sketch on top of a map: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1XaCwpG_5_PoufehgNUFF9u-q0VzaeB1Z/view

Thanks, to be honest I don't like it. It might be accurate from geology standpoint but in terms of proximity it doesn't feel right. I think to a typical user it won't make sense that you have Bialystok and Wroclaw in the same area. Maybe other users could have better ideas...Leśny Dziad, what do you think?

It's not an easy task, because I think that classifying gyms according to the physico-geographical categories is as ridiculuos as classifying natural rock formations according to the administrative boundaries.

So, if it is possible I would move all the gyms to the area covering the whole coutry named e.g. "Gyms in Poland". It may have subdivision based on voivodships and cities.

As for the rock formations clasification based on the physico-geographical division makes sense when it reflects similarities and differences between areas/ crags. The Crag is just a nice climbing guidebook and logbook, so IMO there is no need go deep in physico-geographical subdivisions if it isn't helpful for the users.

For example lets take a look at "Pojezierza i Pobrzeża" and "Niziny". What is the difference between rock formations suitable for climbing at those areas? If you are very desperate you may find there only some granite erratic boulders. Those two areas I wold merge to "Niż Polski".

Karpaty, Sudety and Wyżyny are the only regions in Poland with serious rock formations. Each of those regions has its own specifity, different origin of the rocks. This subdivision at The Crag makes sense for me.

I'm pretty sure such system of gyms being completely cut off from natural crags hasn't ever been implemented on this site, so it would probably have to be discussed with theCrag admins. I personally don't like this idea if it would only be implemented in Poland.

Although I agree that Pojezierza, Pobrzeża, and Niziny could be merged into one area.

Thanks both, I have cleaned it up now, feel free to change anything. I would personally suggest to Merge Pogórze Sudeckie into Sudety but not an expert in this part of Poland. I Just think Sokoliki and Rudawy deserve to be right under Sudety and now lower in the hiearchy

Thank you for implementing the changes! I will try to make the node placements and lower subdivisions more accurate in the near future

good discussion, resolution and execution

would love to see that all over theCragWorld

Thank you guys! Thanks to this, we are closer to a good structure of regions in Poland.

I don't like this new hierarchy. You have to keep proper priorities and be realistic. Making any changes to rock crags (which is the essential feature of this site) just to nicely fit climbing gyms (which are not and - in foreseeable future - will not be used by anyone from Poland) is a complete inversion of priorities. If the strange dual-hierarchy of rocks vs gyms bothers anyone so much, I say we just delete all the gyms and be done with that - they serve no purpose anyway, as no gym owner will update them with REAL routes (instead of "one route to make the gym visible") and no one will ever log anything there. I'm pretty confident that if anyone will ever look for a climbing gym when visiting Poland, Google will be their first choice and TheCrag will not be on the list. Even if someone would add all the gyms in Poland, Google would still win, as what I want to know are: opening hours, price, photos and so on, and not just a location on Polish map.

Also note that for almost any country in Europe with a lot of climbing (Italy, Spain, Germany, France, ...) the hierarchy is the same as administrative borders + important/large crags at top level - like Frankenjura and some other crags in Germany. They have a lot of items at the top-level, but so what? If we would have the biggest crags at top-level + some regions as buckets for "the rest" I don't think there would be more than 20-30 items and no one would have to wonder whether particular spot is in Karpaty or Highlands or whatever. I'm also pretty sure that much more people in Poland are familiar with administrative borders, as opposed to the pretty low number of people who can draw where are Karpaty and Sudety... At least because the map used here as the background has administrative borders but doesn't have borders for any mountains.

In the future it would be much better if you could wait more than 2 days for input from other people when changing top-level layout of the whole country... What was here previously was indeed a mess, but what we have now is not so much better, at least from usefulness point of view.

In what way does this new system sacrifice the organization of rock crags? My thought behind this was to have everything well-organized, not just the gyms. If somebody doesn't know that Jura is located in the Highlands, they could still use the map, the search function, or trial and error throughout just 4 subdivisions. In my opinion it's a small price to pay for having everything well-organized and consistent.

I agree with Freddie mainly about important crags being on the top level - that's where I think Jura, Beskid, Tatry should be. That's how I made the initial change - putting most stuff under North and Central Poland (which now was changed to Niz) and then having Sudety, Jura, Beskid, Tatry as top level. In my opinion the best compromise.

I don't like the important crags being clumped under Wyzyny and Region Karpacki. Those region divisions may make a geography hobbyist happy but are not terms a normal person will understand.

But also to be frank this isn't too precious to me, I think it's not the most important thing in the world. Most people are likely to navigate through the map anyway, clicking on where the numbers of routes show up and ignoring the hiearchy.

It's probably best to consider removing top level regions to have everything lumped together when all of the lower subdivisions are already in place - in that case we would see how many objects we have to work with and if it would actually be worth doing.

> In what way does this new system sacrifice the organization of rock crags? My thought behind this was to have everything well-organized, not just the gyms. If somebody doesn't know that Jura is located in the Highlands, they could still use the map, the search function, or trial and error throughout just 4 subdivisions. In my opinion it's a small price to pay for having everything well-organized and consistent.

But what's the added value of having things well organized from either geological/geographical or administrative purpose in a climbing logbook? In my opinion, the only reason to have a hierarchy here is to allow dozens and dozens of smaller crags to be "hidden" and not clutter top-level view. These smaller crags obviously can be organized somehow, but given that they ARE small and would rarely span more than one voivodeship, I'm pretty sure that administrative division is just the simplest one. Dividing that into "wyżyny" and "niziny" serves little purpose, as one will still have 90% of smaller crags while the other covers half of country and will have almost none (;

> I don't like the important crags being clumped under Wyzyny and Region Karpacki. Those region divisions may make a geography hobbyist happy but are not terms a normal person will understand.

This is the whole point of my post here. This is a climbing logbook and not wikipedia or textbook for university. Jura, Sokoliki, Rudawy and Czarnorzeki together have 77% of all routes (13k of 17k) and 88% of all logged ascents (7k of 8k). This will not change dramatically in near future. 88% of visitors will therefore need to click through several levels (in case of Czarnorzeki - way too many) just to get to what they need. Do you really expect an average climber, who may be of any educational background (or still a kid) to know that Czarnorzeki are in Pogórze Dynowskie (first time in my life I've heard about it), which is in Beskidy and Pogórze Karpackie? I seriously doubt that majority of the locals know that... To be fair I usually have to look for Sokoliki by following the highest number of ascents as well, as I never remember that they are in Pogórze Sudeckie. I also don't have high hopes that majority of people in Poland (not even considering other countries) know that Tatry are part of Karpaty and not something "standalone" - maybe they knew in school, but forgotten that long time ago.

> It's probably best to consider removing top level regions to have everything lumped together when all of the lower subdivisions are already in place - in that case we would see how many objects we have to work with and if it would actually be worth doing.

But we do not need to have EVERYTHING at top level, that's not the point. However we could (in my opinion - should) keep the major ones on top. We don't even need to argue about which one is or isn't a major crag - just include the ones that have significantly more routes and/or ascents than others (in our Polish case, the differences are of several orders of magnitude). As long as TheCrag doesn't fold them into alphabetic groups (like in Beskidy i Pogórza Karpackie, with the A-E, F-J, etc.), we are perfectly fine. In reality these would be just a few crags: Jura, Sokoliki, Rudawy for a start, maybe also Czarnorzeki and Tatry (although they don't have that many ascents/routes now).

I don't think any other popular country on TheCrag has a system like the one you implemented now. They are either strictly administrative or mixed (administrative + couple major crags) or very-simple-geographical (north, south, west, east, so something everyone understands). Take a look at Germany, France, Spain, Italy, Slovakia, Czechia, Greece, ... In Slovakia Tatras are standalone. In Czechia Beskidy are part of an administrative region (I think) or North Moravia and Silesia.

And I would seriously reconsider adding gyms. What value do they bring to TheCrag? Because they sure do add some problems to the hierarchy, because some regions would not be needed at all if not for the gyms, which are not used by anyone anyway. I believe that gyms are something that should be added AND maintained by gym owners, but only if they also add and update the routes.

I very well understand your points now. I will need to think it through to understand the best way it could be execute it, though.

TLDR; I have a proposal to improve area organization in general but it requires a bit of coding.

Glad to find this discussion because I'm trying to solve this exact "data silo" problem myself (Full disclosure: I'm one of the devs behind openbeta.io)

I'm learning a lot from different viewpoints in this discussion. While it's not wrong to put climbing areas under geopolitical/administrative boundaries, it's not how we climbers see them.

I studied the data organization on theCrag and MountainProject (a US-centric site) and saw similar issues and limitations.

For example, my hometown, Portland is in the state of Oregon. But it's located only a few kilometers away from Washington state where there are also a handful of popular crags. Currently if you look at the Portland area, you only see crags in my state, but not those in our neighboring state.

Red Rock is another good example. Most of us refer to the area directly because it's super well-known, or maybe associate it with Las Vegas because ... it's Vegas where you can fly to cheaply. On MountainProject it's organized under Nevada state -> Southern Nevada region. No climbers I know use this hierarchy.

I think the issue stems from the fact that there is only one way to build the hierarchy.

I studied OpenStreetMap (OSM) a bit and see an elegant solution that we may be able to adopt though it will require coding.

In OSM there are 2 important concepts: "tags" (think social media hashtags) and "relations" (collections of hashtags).

To find a list of capitals you can simply search for "capital=yes".

Now let's generalize the concept a bit, Capitals <==> major climbing destinations. Other subareas can be associated with one or more than areas. Then we can slice the data however we wish.

All major and important climbing destinations can have the admin_parent tag set to their corresponding administrative/geography parent.

Areas can also have additional tags to indicate whether they're a destination or sub-area.

Since I'm not too familiar with Poland, I'm going to use Spain as a concrete example.

• Siurana, Margalef: admin_parent=Catalonia, destination=true
• El Choro: admin_parent = Andalucia, destination=true

This way we can build multiple views into our data, showing major areas by state/voivodeships relationship or just list all major climbing destinations in a country (destination=true).

I can go into more detail on how to further classify subareas but I think the post is already detracting from the original discussion. If everyone's interested in discussing more I'd be happy to start a separate thread.

So, I finally got around to adding some new areas and restructuring others so that all current climbing locations, both artificial and natural, would be within a region. It is now possible to remove the unnecessary top levels (Region Karpacki, Niż Polski, Wyżyny Polski). If somebody has suggestions about a better way to structure things or believes that the top levels should stay, please comment here. It would be great to hear all opinions as it is a major step to take.

Thank you, so do you suggest we should remove the top levels? Region Karpacki, Niż Polski, Wyżyny Polski... If yes, I agree with this, we should delete them. Not sure if it makes sense to have regions with zero routes but maybe it's useful for the future, I don't mind.

If we remove the top-level now, the new top-level will have 36 entries, which would be mixed administrative (some, but not all voivodeships) and geographical (like Jura, Tatry and so on). Some of these top-level items would be empty, at least now. I guess the majority of them would be for regions which would see almost no "traffic" at all.

We can try and see where it gets us, but as a next step I would suggest grouping some less significant top-level regions if possible in some logical way (maybe for example adding one or two more voivodeships would allow to move 7 small regions into them or sth like that).

All of the regions with zero routes do actually have climbing locations - it's just that me or anyone else didn't get around to add them yet. For almost all of them there are some unpopular or undeveloped outdoor climbing locations. Just 5 of them only contain gyms (as far as I'm aware) - those are: Kotlina Oświęcimska, Województwo podlaskie, Województwo dolnośląskie - niż, Województwo opolskie - niż, Racibórz. I still decided to add them for the sake of consistency and because that actually won't create too much clutter - they will be located at the end of the region list anyways.

It is OK for me to remove top levels.

However, there is still a mess within Sudety area. I try to clean it up step by step, but there is still a lot of work to be done. I'm not an expert on Sudety, so it takes some time for me.

I think it would be easier for me to work on the structure of Sudety area before this area is removed.

I don't think Sudety should be removed. The main reason the other top levels are being removed is because they are not intuitive and don't actually help much with having everything in order. Sudety, however, is a term used really often in the climbing community (unlike Wyżyny Polskie and Region Karpacki), so it should stay.

Sviatoslav Saviak good job man!

Should I remove "Pieniński Pas Skałkowy" now? And if you have any other suggestions definitely let me know.