Sources of each fact and how we check it

How the facts are gathered

We read the website of each provider and note what it offers children by its own account: ages, the weekly timetable, prices with the period they cover, languages, taster sessions and whether a parent has to stay.

An address, a map position or opening hours may also be taken from the provider’s Google Maps entry. A club’s membership of a sports federation may be taken from the member list that the federation or its Viennese association publishes.

With each fact we store the web address of its page, the date we read it and a short quotation in the page’s own language. Listing portals, newspaper articles, booking platforms, social media and reviews are never a source.

Source flags

Every source carries one of three flags: published by the place (the provider’s own website), Google listing (its Google Maps entry) or federation list (a federation’s published list of member clubs).

On a provider page the flag and the date of reading stand next to every fact, so you can see where it was found and how recent it is.

Facts nobody has published

When none of the pages we read gives a fact, the provider page marks it as not published and the table shows a dash. “Not published” describes our sources; it is no judgement on the provider.

We never fill a gap with a guess. A year of birth or a school class, such as the first Volksschule year, is not converted into an age. A price keeps the period the provider names; the only figure we work out is the ≈ price per session, which divides a course or block price by its sessions.

Session times and opening hours

Times are split over two columns. Session times are the days and hours of a course, a care afternoon or a camp day, as the provider states them. Opening hours say when the building is open and often come from the Google entry.

A provider can be open while no group for a particular age is meeting. A row with opening hours alone is placed under the line, beneath a heading that explains why.

The afternoon pages look at weekdays from 14:00 to 18:00, when primary school children have finished lessons and lunch. A course counts if one of its groups starts inside that window; care counts if its hours, late hours included, cover the whole window.

What the catalogue leaves unjudged

There is no rating, score or rank for any provider, teacher, coach or programme.
Nobody visits the providers; each fact comes from something they or others have published.
Nobody assesses how well children are taught, coached or cared for.
Free places in a group are not tracked; the provider can tell you.
Prices are shown as published, with their period and date, and are not checked with the provider.

Corrections by providers

If you run a listed provider and a fact is wrong, incomplete or outdated, send a correction through the error form together with a link to the page where the correct fact appears.

A correction backed by the provider’s own pages is applied at the next update and noted in the history of changes. A provider that stops operating keeps its page, marked as no longer operating, and leaves every table.

A provider can also ask to be removed: choose “Ask for a listed provider to be removed” in the error form and give a contact that shows you run it. The provider, its page and its records in the data files are deleted within one month.

Dates and updates

Each provider’s sources are read again within 6 months of the last reading. A price published for a period that has ended stays on the provider page together with that period, while the filters and the summary line ignore it.

Money

Providers pay nothing to appear, and no payment changes a row or where it stands in the table.

A provider page may carry a single link to Zartrace, a service connected with this catalogue and labelled as such. Clicks on contact buttons are counted only in total, with no personal data.

Open data

You can download the whole catalogue as JSON, with one record per provider, or as CSV, with one row per offer. Both files include every source, flag and date and name their licence.

Districts, distance and the map

Areas are Vienna’s districts (Bezirke): the inner districts as a whole and the large outer ones divided into the parts that residents name, such as Kagran or Aspern in Donaustadt and Jedlesee in Floridsdorf, each shown with its district. The Lower Austrian towns along the city boundary, from Klosterneuburg to Schwechat, are areas of their own. Seestadt, the new quarter by the lake in Aspern with its own U-Bahn terminus, is an area as well, because parents name it instead of Aspern. A location belongs to the area whose official boundary its address lies within, or to Seestadt when it stands close to the centre of that quarter.

Distance is measured as a straight line from the point you pick to the provider’s nearest location and rounded to half a kilometre. Your position is asked for only when you press the button, and it stays in your browser.