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Wikipedia had wrong Vatican flag for years – now incorrect flags are everywhere

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Re: Wikipedia had wrong Vatican flag for years – now incorrect flags are everywhere

#51

Post by someotherperson »

kevinmchugh wrote: post #49
dheera wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's the punishment companies get for not providing their official logos for download in an easy format without fuss. If you have a startup, have a "media kit" page with all of this stuff. Logos for black and white backgrounds in open vector and raster formats, founder photos, bios, company intros, product photos, video clips of your product that you're okay with media cutting up and using.

If you want it to be usable on Wikipedia, how do you assign the IP?

A lot of companies release press kits for proper usage of their logos without necessarily transferring the IP. I imagine in a lot of cases (including Wikipedia) it falls under fair use -- ultimately the logo is still trademarked.

Re: Wikipedia had wrong Vatican flag for years – now incorrect flags are everywhere

#52

Post by yongjik »

slacka wrote: post #45
yongjik wrote: post #8

It becomes worse as you move further away from Anglosphere: according to Wikipedia the ancient Korean kingdom of Goguryeo has a forked red/yellow flag, but AFAIK that's total fabrication, based on a single mention in the record that said "Some troops of Goguryeo used red flags." If I were still in my 20s I might have fought Wikilawyers on this. Now I'm old and I have enough shit to take care of. :/

Did you find sources and make the edit? Or just assume it would be rejected? In my experience, the vast majority of my edits were accepted when properly sourced, especially on esoteric topics like this. Yes, there are exceptions and bad apples in the community. Those get a all the attention and media coverage but I've only encountered them on heavily edited and visited pages, not the more rare academic or historic pa…

Who knows? Maybe the edit will stay, maybe it won't, but the very fact that the flag has been staying for years doesn't bode well for my effort. There are millions of Koreans who can write passable English: if it were that easy to remove the flag, someone would have done it.

Re: Wikipedia had wrong Vatican flag for years – now incorrect flags are everywhere

#53

Post by bboygravity »

addaon wrote: post #38
Someone wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> but it looks like it's something like "banner divided in yellow (towards the flagpole) and white https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flag_of_Vatican_City says “A vertical bicolour of gold and white” . I would have thought that should be gold and silver ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tincture_(heraldry) ), but ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tincture_(heraldry)#Other_tinc... ) “The heraldic scholar A. C. Fox-Davies propo…

> Maybe it is gold and white. Yeah. In general, the first rule of heraldry ("metal should not be placed upon metal, nor color upon color") trumps the convention of "use standard heraldric colors." Gold touching silver violates the first rule; gold touching white violates only convention.

k thanks, now I want to know what official flag breaks/broke the most of those rules and conventions :p

Re: Wikipedia had wrong Vatican flag for years – now incorrect flags are everywhere

#54

Post by lolinder »

This feels like the author jumped to the conclusion that Wikipedia was at fault because it's a common enough story and sounded good, but it doesn't add up. See addaon's comment for an explanation of why heraldry here isn't as cut-and-dry as we're used to for, say, the US flag.

But even aside from that, the author neglected to check the full edit history on the Wikipedia file: the very first version of the flag (25 Nov 2005) had the red tiara that the article decries, citing Open Clip Art as the source [0]. That suggests the "wrong" version was already highly circulated before Wikipedia got the image.

The caption on the main photo goes so far as to suggest that the Vatican itself is using Wikipedia as a source for printing its flags. Indeed, the UN has a photo of the flag of the Vatican shortly after it was raised there in 2015, and that flag has the red tiara [1]. It's hard to imagine the flag flown at the UN being done as a rush job from a Wikipedia article.

It's a cute story, but it looks like the simpler truth is that the Vatican doesn't particularly care about the coloring of the tiara.

EDIT: Kudos to zokier for finding a Twitter thread with more examples [2]. Apparently the flag taken to the moon and back by Apollo 11 had the red tiara.

[0] https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=File:Flag_of...

[1] https://dam.media.un.org/asset-management/2AM9LO46AB5A?FR_=1...

[2] zokier's comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36118232

Re: Wikipedia had wrong Vatican flag for years – now incorrect flags are everywhere

#56

Post by addaon »

bboygravity wrote: post #53
addaon wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Maybe it is gold and white. Yeah. In general, the first rule of heraldry ("metal should not be placed upon metal, nor color upon color") trumps the convention of "use standard heraldric colors." Gold touching silver violates the first rule; gold touching white violates only convention.

k thanks, now I want to know what official flag breaks/broke the most of those rules and conventions :p

Eh, rules are meant to be broken. And keep in mind these are at best European rules -- and even then, certain areas (England!) took them more seriously than others.

There's also a lot of rules lawyering possible. e.g. red doesn't touch black on the German flag, because that would violate the first rule; instead, the field (background) is half black and half gold (color touching metal, fine), and the red stripe is on top of this field, totally legal, wink wink.

That said, trying to follow these rules has led to some strange decisions; e.g. it's interesting to look into (some unverified stories about) why the US flag has white (silver, metal) stripes on a red background, while the US seal has red stripes on a white background.

Re: Wikipedia had wrong Vatican flag for years – now incorrect flags are everywhere

#57

Post by wizzwizz4 »

kevinmchugh wrote: post #49
dheera wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's the punishment companies get for not providing their official logos for download in an easy format without fuss. If you have a startup, have a "media kit" page with all of this stuff. Logos for black and white backgrounds in open vector and raster formats, founder photos, bios, company intros, product photos, video clips of your product that you're okay with media cutting up and using.

If you want it to be usable on Wikipedia, how do you assign the IP?

Release it under a CC 4.0 license. Section 2b2:

> Patent and trademark rights are not licensed under this Public License.

Re: Wikipedia had wrong Vatican flag for years – now incorrect flags are everywhere

#58

Post by ttepasse »

Someone wrote: post #26
addaon wrote: post #2

One of looking at this is that European banners, coats of arms, etc, are traditionally defined in writing (often using a domain-specific language called a blazon), and then compiled to a visual form by a banner maker. This compilation is intended to be reversible -- one goal is to be able to look up the written form in a book of heraldry based on the visual appearance -- but, just like compiling code, is not a one-to…

> but it looks like it's something like "banner divided in yellow (towards the flagpole) and white https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flag_of_Vatican_City says “A vertical bicolour of gold and white” . I would have thought that should be gold and silver ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tincture_(heraldry) ), but ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tincture_(heraldry)#Other_tinc... ) “The heraldic scholar A. C. Fox-Davies propo…

> “The heraldic scholar A. C. Fox-Davies proposed that, in some circumstances, white should be considered a heraldic colour, distinct from argent”

I took a look, just because Fox-Davies can be absurdly and amusingly pedantic about that stuff:

He only postulates White as tincture for labels of cadency – as in the CoA of the Prince of Wales. The idea is to difference it from argent. The supporters of the PoW’s CoA are a lion or and the unicorn argent – both with a label. If the label was argent it would be a violation of the rule of tinctures for the lion and without distinction from the unicorn.

https://archive.org/details/completeguidetoh00foxdrich/page/...

But I don’t think heraldic rules apply for flags. For banners and standards, which are CoAs in flag form, but the general flags are not CoA.

Re: Wikipedia had wrong Vatican flag for years – now incorrect flags are everywhere

#59

Post by kemayo »

yongjik wrote: post #52
slacka wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did you find sources and make the edit? Or just assume it would be rejected? In my experience, the vast majority of my edits were accepted when properly sourced, especially on esoteric topics like this. Yes, there are exceptions and bad apples in the community. Those get a all the attention and media coverage but I've only encountered them on heavily edited and visited pages, not the more rare academic or historic pa…

Who knows? Maybe the edit will stay, maybe it won't, but the very fact that the flag has been staying for years doesn't bode well for my effort. There are millions of Koreans who can write passable English: if it were that easy to remove the flag, someone would have done it.

I suspect there's a much smaller number who affirmatively know that there's not a specific flag for a kingdom that ceased to exist 1,335 years ago. Particularly since the article presents both a pure red flag and the red/yellow flag and claims they were used at different times.

Thus I'd imagine that of the small number of people intimately familiar with Korean history who even noticed, very few could say with sufficient certainty that the flag was never used.

(For that matter, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Korean_flags has a third variant...)

Re: Wikipedia had wrong Vatican flag for years – now incorrect flags are everywhere

#60

Post by ttepasse »

bertil wrote: post #43

I’m really surprised that Father Becker thinks this is a meaningful difference. I’m as detail-oriented as it gets, but symbols on flags and coats of arms are a notoriously hard thing to get “right” and I’m not sure they should. Noble houses had lions, dolphins, elephants, and unicorns on their coat of arms at a time when people (bored monks who never left their monastery) drew them like a confused alcoholic toddler,…

> There’s a rumour that the carpet has another version: one where the Eagle looks right, towards the arrows, and that the carpet can be switched if the country is at war. I like that idea.

In recent decades every president get’s his own rug with his own design [1]. It’s even more amusing, if you imagine a storehouse somewhere with the unused “wars rugs” of past presidents.

[1] https://www.ahs.com/home-matters/resources/the-evolution-of-...

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