Sources of the facts and how they are checked
Where the facts come from
We read each provider’s own website and note what it says it offers children: ages, the weekly timetable, prices and the period they cover, languages, trial lessons and whether a parent has to stay.
Addresses, map positions and opening hours may also come from the provider’s Google Maps listing. For a club, membership of a sports federation may come from the list of member clubs that the federation publishes.
Each fact is kept with the address of its page, the date we read it and a short quotation in that page’s language. Directories, press articles, booking portals, social networks and reviews are never used as sources.
Source flags
Each source carries one of three flags: published by the place (the provider’s own website), Google listing (its entry on Google Maps) or federation list (a sports federation’s register of member clubs).
On a provider’s page the flag and the reading date appear beside each fact, so you can tell where it comes from and how old it is.
Facts that are not published
When the pages we read do not give a fact, the provider page marks it as not published and the table shows a dash. “Not published” is about our sources and says nothing about the provider.
Missing facts are never guessed. A birth-year group (Jahrgang) or a school level such as the first Kindergarten year is not turned into an age. A price keeps the period the provider gives; the single calculation is the ≈ price per lesson, a course or pass price divided by its lessons.
Course times and opening hours
Times appear in two columns. Course times: the days and hours of a course, a care session or a holiday programme day, as the provider gives them. Opening hours: when the building is open, often from the Google listing.
A provider may be open at a time when no group for a given age is meeting. A row with opening hours and nothing else goes below the dividing line, under a heading that says so.
The after-school pages look at weekdays from 16:00 to 18:00, once afternoon lessons are over at primary school. A course counts when one of its groups starts within that span; after-school care counts when its hours, extended hours included, fill the span completely.
What this catalogue does not judge
- Providers, teachers, coaches and programmes get no rating, score or rank.
- No one inspects providers on site; each fact is taken from a published source.
- Nobody judges how well a course is taught, a team coached or children cared for.
- Whether a group still has free places is not tracked; ask the provider.
- Prices appear as published, with their period and date, and are not checked with the provider.
Corrections from providers
If you run a listed provider and a fact is wrong, missing or out of date, send a correction through the correction form, with a link to the page that shows the right fact.
A correction that the provider’s own pages support goes into the next update and is recorded under what changed. A provider that has closed keeps its page, marked as closed, and leaves every table.
A provider can also ask to be taken off the list: choose “Ask to remove a listed provider” in the correction form and give a contact that shows you run it. The provider, its page and its records in the data files are removed within one month.
Dates and updates
Each provider’s sources are read again no later than 6 months after the previous reading. A price published for a period that has ended stays on the provider page with that period, and the filters and the summary line leave it out.
How the catalogue is funded
Providers do not pay to be listed, and no payment alters a row or its place in the table.
A provider page may carry one link to Zartrace, a service linked to this catalogue and marked as such. Clicks on the contact buttons are counted only as totals, without personal data.
Open data
The whole catalogue can be downloaded as JSON, one record per provider, or as CSV, one row per offer. Both files contain every source, flag and date, and state their licence.
Areas, distance and the map
Areas are the statistical Quartiere of the city of Zurich, with the four small Quartiere of the old town counted as one, the Altstadt; the municipalities around the city; and Zollikerberg, the village on the hill that parents name instead of Zollikon. A location is filed under the Quartier or municipality whose official boundary contains it, or under Zollikerberg when it lies close to the village centre.
Distance is measured in a straight line from the point you choose to the nearest location and rounded to half a kilometre. Your position is requested only when you press the button and never leaves your browser.
Points placed from an address are approximate. Map data © OpenStreetMap contributors; Quartier boundaries from the City of Zurich’s open government data.