Talk:Geographer

Comments

Um,I'm confused. What does 'location problems' mean? Environmental problems we all can understand, but no one really knows what 'location problems' means. Over population? Pollution? Let's fix that.

You need to add something about Chasing Vermmer on this page. Some people need to look that up and they can not find it under anything. So they come here and they do not find anything about the book Chasing Vermeer. So I would suggest that you add something about Chasing Vermeer.

Painting

Discussion of the painting absolutely does not belong here. If it's notable, it should have its own page, with a disambiguation redirect on this one. —Kerfuffler 00:24, 12 September 2012 (UTC)

External links modified

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List of geographers

I don't believe that the list of notable geographers belongs here. At the very least, there should not be such detailed descriptions of the geographers. Also, the information on the painting seems out of place. Sehtnaryhpez (talk) 22:36, 20 November 2018 (UTC)

I agree about the list and have removed it. As I said in my edit summary, a separate article might be worth considering, especially if there's a similar good article. It would need consensus for an inclusion criteria that is neutral, and each entry should summarize the existing article on the subject rather than being written from poor sources. If there are no similar GA articles, then it might be best to scrap the idea completely. The POV and OR problems that arise from attempting such a list, especially a list with substantial summaries of each entry, seem overwhelming. --Ronz (talk) 18:42, 7 January 2019 (UTC)

Organizations

Should I add notable geographer organizations here? Is this not the right place to add it here. SVcode(Talk) 00:59, 9 October 2021 (UTC)

Organization of Article

I believe this article could use some form of reorganization. Specifically, the second and third paragraphs could swap places. The third paragraph is more relevant to this article because it is describing what geographers are, whereas the second paragraph is describing what they are not. The second paragraph could be omitted entirely, or a brief sentence added onto the end of the third. Katsteil (talk) 00:35, 8 September 2025 (UTC)

Major overhaul discussion

@User:Atualizador Oeste Catarinense has made some pretty major changes to the page. I haven't had time to look through the material completely yet, but believe some of the removed content was valuable, and think the additions could use improvements. Most notably, the section "Professional practice" probably needs to be restructured. The examples are haphazard, include multiple levels of specialization, and don't have a good point of reference for why we include these and not any of the countless others. Removed content included some fairly well cited material, including discussion of the four traditions and the branches, I believe this could serve as a starting point to improve this section, and justify organization.

Other changes, like removing the geography portal at the bottom of the page, do not make any sense to me. I understand this editor is a bit new, and I appriciate bold edits on pages that are in desperate need for improvement, but think adding 19,446 bytes is probably worth discussing. Figured I'd ask this user directly, and try to improve these changes here, rather then revert outright. GeogSage ^{(⚔Chat?⚔)} 22:58, 25 September 2026 (UTC)

Thank you for taking the time to review the changes and, especially, for bringing the concerns to the talk page rather than simply reverting such a large edit.

The main rationale behind the rewrite was to make a clearer distinction between the geographer as a person/practitioner and Geography as the discipline. The previous version contained a considerable amount of useful and well-sourced material, but much of it seemed to describe the internal organization of geography itself — its branches, traditions and schools of thought — rather than geographers, their work, methods, education, professional roles and institutional contexts.

That was the main reason for reducing the detailed treatment of subjects such as the four traditions and the branches of geography. I certainly do not regard that material as unimportant. My concern was mainly one of scope and duplication: topics such as physical geography, human geography, regional geography, and Pattison's four traditions are primarily classifications or intellectual frameworks of the discipline and are already treated in Geography and related articles. I thought this article would work better if it summarized those aspects where necessary while concentrating more directly on geographers themselves, broadly in line with the idea behind WP:SUMMARYSTYLE.

I do, however, agree with your criticism of the current Professional practice section. The purpose of that section was to show the breadth of work actually carried out by geographers and to avoid giving the impression that a geographer is simply synonymous with a cartographer, GIS specialist, geography teacher or academic researcher. The examples were drawn from occupational and professional sources such as the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, the Royal Geographical Society and the American Association of Geographers.

That said, I can see that the present organization mixes different levels of classification. For example, "physical geography and environmental analysis" is a broad area, while biogeography or transport analysis are more specific specializations. Presenting them side by side can therefore look arbitrary even though the individual examples are relevant.

One possible solution would be to reorganize that section into a smaller number of broader areas of practice, with the more specialized activities treated as examples within them rather than as equivalent categories. For instance, the section could distinguish broadly between environmental and physical-geographic work; human, socioeconomic and regional analysis; planning and territorial studies; cartography and geospatial analysis; and research, consulting and public administration. I would also be open to reincorporating material from the earlier version where it helps explain the work or intellectual foundations of geographers without reproducing a general classification of the discipline.

The additions concerning education, professional recognition, institutions and professional history were intended to address what I thought was another weakness of the previous article: it said relatively little about geographers working outside the traditional academic context. Geographers are employed in government, planning, environmental work, consulting, geospatial analysis, research and other settings, and the way the profession is institutionally recognized differs considerably between countries. I therefore tried to give the article a more international perspective, with particular attention to the United States, United Kingdom and Canada, while also including Brazil because it represents a substantially different statutory model of professional recognition.

This was not intended to suggest that academic geographers are somehow separate from "real" geographers. Research and higher education remain important parts of the article. The distinction I was trying to make was between an article about people who practise geography and an article explaining geography itself as a field of knowledge.

Regarding the Geography portal, I checked the current article and it appears to be present at the bottom of the page. In any case, I agree that it belongs there and there was no intention to remove it as part of the rewrite.

I agree that an edit of this size deserves discussion, and I do not consider the new structure fixed. I would be happy to improve it collaboratively, particularly the Professional practice section, and to restore useful material from the previous version where it fits the scope of an article about geographers rather than duplicating the broader coverage at Geography.

Atualizador Oeste Catarinense (talk) 23:19, 25 September 2026 (UTC)

First question: Based on the length of this reply in about 21 minutes (about 32 word per minute, not exceptional, but if you're thinking through a reply, pretty fast.), and the size of the edit you made, are you using AI?

Next: Biogeography is a type of physical geography. Transport geography is a type of human geography. Cartography falls under technical geography. A biogeographer is a physical geographer, just like they are a geographer. This is why a framework is necessary. It's like having a list of types of tools, and including "Hammers" and "Ball-peen hammer." I've discussed this before on various talk pages, but organizing geography is an active area of research, and if we do this ourselves without citations, we are doing WP:OR. Generally, the two approaches are either the traditions or the branches, although there are others. If focusing on the applied side of "people who practice geography," the branches would probably be the best approach.

Finally: I misspoke about the portal, I meant the Template:Geography topics. It seems to have been removed. GeogSage ^{(⚔Chat?⚔)} 23:45, 25 September 2026 (UTC)