Difference between Spitsbergen and Svalbard

Can anyone explain me the difference between these two 'countries' in our Catalog?
Thanks in advance,
Nicola

The Norwegian territory Spitsbergen has also been known as Svalbard (I believe this is the Swedish name). So the Svalbard listing serves as a cross-reference to the Spitsbergen page. Spitsbergen is the actual territory name in Numista.

Similar situations exist for Burma as a cross-reference to the more modern name Myanmar and Great Britain as a cross-reference to the more formal United Kingdom.

I really wish we could delete duplicate countries in the country list.
maybe we could do Spitsbergen / Svalbard instead of two listings

Wikipedia says that Spitsbergen is the largest island of Norway's Svalbard territory. It's also the only island with a permanent human population. All of Svalbard used to be referred to as Spitsbergen in English, but that apparently caused too much confusion. The Russians were never informed of this and their name for all of Svalbard remains "Шпицберген", "Shpitsbergen".

In the Numista catalog, the two words are used more or less interchangeably.

Peanuts!!!
It's still part of Norway, so it rests Norway!

Ole

We're not saying Svalbard is no more Norwegian but we can't ignore the Svalbard Treaty made near a century ago allowing foreigners to settle there for any resources, like Soviet/Russian mining facilities, which required the Soviet/Russian companies to make their own token currency instead of both Russian and Norwegian ones.

erovisser, I like your idea.