Talk:Mont Blanc

Summit ownership - more citations needed

I have attempted to bring together some recent, badly copy-pasted translations from the Italian version of this article, and tried to fix a load of faulty Italian citations which were also pasted in at the same time. This has involved cleaning up irrelevant content and updating dead links. There are still quite a lot of unsupported Italian statements I don't like, so I make no apologies for over-templating this relatively sensitive subtopic with {{cn}} notes in the hope that editors might fill in the gaps with some good reliable sources from both sides of this historic land dispute. Nick Moyes (talk) 10:41, 30 October 2020 (UTC)

What statements?!?!?!? What reliable resources?!?!!? Isn't 1832 Map of the Kingdom of Sardinia reliable? Don't you like it? What about the Sardinian Atlas map of 1869? You also don't like it so that's not reliable? You don't like because you want to assert there is no territorial dispute? Maybe you want to arbitrarily draw the line? Well you wouldn't be the first anyway, but I wonder if that's how things work. I'm waiting for your explanation about what is reliable and what is not — Preceding unsigned comment added by 95.249.7.224 (talk) 13:40, 3 November 2020 (UTC)

Dear IP editor. There is no reason for you to get so angry. If you actually stopped for a moment and looked at the work I put in to sort out your poorly machine translated, copypasted edits from Italian Wikipedia, you will appreciate that I actually want to see the section on the ownership dispute presented well. I could much more easily have reverted your edits as being in an unacceptable form for English Wikipedia. Instead, I spent a couple of hours cleaning them up, finding replacement live urls, and adding templates to each statement you added that was not supported by a citation to a Reliable Source. (The answer to your question is that each uncited statement has a teeny tiny notice after it saying:) By having supporting links to reliable sources we end up with fewer angry people like you - or you counterparts over on the French side of the mountain - arguing repeatedly over the topic, or inserting unsupported statement. (I personally believe there is no geographical rationale for France to claim ownership of anything other than half the summit crest of Mont Blanc, and none of Mont Blanc de Courmayeur. But my personal feelings or beliefs are irrelevant to Wikipedia editing - and I wish yours would be, too). So please don't throw your silly remarks at me, or suggest I'm trying to assert there's no territorial dispute, when there clearly is one; that really is a foolish thing for you to conclude from my editing. I fully recognise there is a heated dispute over summit ownership - I simply wish to encourage editors to include a citation for every potentially disputable sentence in that section. If you can help out by actually learning how to inserting citations (see this tutorial or this one) - rather than blandly copy/pasting these bad machine translation and useless Italian citation templates over to en-wiki which don't work here - that would be absolutely wonderful. Then you would be on your way to becoming a helpful Wikipedia editor here, and less of a disruptive influence and time-sink. You said "I'm waiting for your explanation about what is reliable and what is not", so my answer is to invite you now to please go and read Wikipedia:Reliable sources to help the learning process. Nick Moyes (talk) 20:42, 7 November 2020 (UTC)

"Since 2017 Google Earth has used the maps of the Italian Istituto Geografico Militare and NATO." While I agree that having the border coincide with the watershed makes sense, I am afraid I do not see any link to NATO documents in the preceding statements; I am not even aware of NATO actually publishing maps.
As to Google Earth, now (September 2021) the disputed area is marked as... (surprise) disputed, i.e. with a red border.
Now, sources: the French Via Michelin at https://www.viamichelin.fr/web/Cartes-plans/Carte_plan-France shows indeed Mont Blanc on the French/Italian border and so does the 1941 U.S. Army Map at https://maps.lib.utexas.edu/maps/ams/italy_250k/; on the other hand, the French government website at https://www.geoportail.gouv.fr/carte (official) shows it entirely in France; the French encyclopedia "Larousse" says it is "en France(...)près de la Frontière italienne", and even www.britannica.com says "The summit is in French territory."
Please note that, while I am an Italian by birth, it is a matter of supreme indifference to me who owns the summit - and as far as I have been able to ascertain in these days, the same seems to be true of all the people I happen to be acquainted with, be they Italian or French. Most of them had no idea that a dispute ever existed, despite having college education and frequently vacationing on either side of Mont Blanc.
Not to put too fine a point on it, we are talking of less than one square kilometer of rather annoyingly cold snow. --2.34.77.226 (talk) 04:18, 10 September 2021 (UTC)

The only objective vision is to accept that there is two visions : one French and one Italian. There is a Committee gathering both parts regularly to talk about this. But everybody knows that the watershed comes with doubts as the Mont Blanc is not a rocky summit or a ridge, but an icy summit. So the argument of watershed also has its limits in this case. But it is not to Wikipedia to decide where is the frontier. And if we want to remain objective the only reality is that there is a conflict and two visions. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 136.173.162.129 (talk) 10:50, 17 June 2022 (UTC)

Second-highest mountain in Europe

For more than a year, the article has claimed that Mont Blanc is the second-highest mountain in Europe. By what definition is this correct? I can't see that this is an established fact, in fact, well-known mountaineering lists such as Seven Second Summits and Seven Third Summits list Dykh-Tau and Shkhara as the second and third highest mountains in Europe. The Wikipedia article Boundaries_between_the_continents_of_Earth#Modern_definition states that a commonly accepted border between Europe and Asia follows the watershed of the Greater Caucasus, thus placing Dykh-Tau, Koshtan-Tau, Mount Kazbek well within Europe, and Shkhara and Janga on the border, all of which are much higher than Mont Blanc. Wikipedia's own List of European ultra-prominent peaks also list the most prominent of the aforementioned peaks as European. I'm therefore removing "second-highest" from the introduction. Mathias-S (talk) 15:23, 26 August 2021 (UTC)

Summit

Summit is different from mountain. 87.20.185.160 (talk) 07:41, 14 June 2022 (UTC)

We should all appreciate that fact, IP editor. Please note that I have removed some recent attempts to fill the lead paragraph with too much detail on summit ownership, yet have retained the statement that Ownership of the summit area has long been a subject of historical dispute between the two countries. That is a valid point to make in a lead, and can be teased out further within the relevant section within article itself. Over-focussing on detail ownership of the summit area within the lead is not appropriate, and simply serves to detract from the broad overview that any WP:LEAD should give. Nick Moyes (talk) 08:44, 14 June 2022 (UTC)

Youngest person, or just youngest Briton?

There are two sources supporting the following statement: "The record for the youngest person to climb Mont Blanc was set in 2009 by 10-year-old Asher Silver (UK).". One says youngest person; the other says youngest Briton. I suspect the latter is more likely to be correct, especially as this Uk news source also states 'youngest Briton'. I can't find any official mountain-related sources to corroborate or contradict them. Nick Moyes (talk) 09:21, 14 June 2022 (UTC)

Let me set my concerns over this statement in context. Many years ago, my English climbing partner (who is now 72) took his young son up the Gouter route on Mont Blanc when the lad was 10 yrs old, and they subsequently did the Brenva together when the lad was 14. Although impressive, it was nothing that special, and certainly not worthy of national media attention back then. So I don't feel the claim in this article is that special either. I propose this claim (to be the youngest person ever) be removed from the article as its probably simply based on poor journalism. As just the youngest Briton, that might well be correct, but is it noteworthy? I don't think so, and so the claim should be removed entirely, I feel. Nick Moyes (talk) 20:51, 18 June 2022 (UTC)

As there have been no objection or counter-argument, I have removed the dubious claim completely with this edit. Further discussion is welcome, but I feel we should not stray into adding youngest people from specific named countries to climb the mountain, lest the section becomes filled with trivial achievements from all nationalities. Nick Moyes (talk) 19:15, 11 July 2022 (UTC)

Lead section: ownership

Will editors stop trying to expand the lead of this article to include detailed information on who claims what bits of the summit. I feel this information is overly detailed for the lead, though I appreciate many are wanting to add clarity in good faith. There is a whole section on Ownership, so just a brief mention of the issue being an area of longstanding dispute between France and Italy is all that the lead needs. i.e. Ownership of the summit area has long been a subject of dispute between France and Italy Anyone wanting further details can then read the appropriate section, so please work to improve that, and please don't expand again without further discussion and consensus here on the Talk page. Thanks, Nick Moyes (talk) 19:07, 11 July 2022 (UTC)