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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

#141
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.

Ideally, your logo in your website should also be a SVG or at least a transparent PNG. I definitely pick it up from Wikipedia when I go do a presentation if it's not there.

I really love a detail in Vercel’s webpage, if you right click on the logo, it offers you a link to go to the press kit page.

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

#142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> nobody would mistake the “wrong” flag of Vatican to represent some completely different entity Compare that to Australia and New Zealand. If you don't know what do look for and aren't aware the other's out there, you could easily mix them up.

NZ came pretty close to changing to an original flag but ended up sticking with that “we’re not Australia, really” flag: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2015–2016_New_Zealand_flag_r...

That man’s vanity project and the shitty options on offer is what scuppered that, not the quality of the existing flag.

I never thought an opportunity to show Laser Kiwi would come up here.

https://nzhistory.govt.nz/media/photo/fire-lazar

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

#143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

IIRC a lot of logos technically don’t meet the threshold of originality so they’re not even copyrightable

In particular, as well as the obvious "can't copyright a circle" concept, wordmarks often don't qualify for copyright. Even if the typeface is copyrighted (as many are), that doesn't transfer to writing in that typeface. As usual, exactly where and to what extent that is true can vary around the world.

Trademark rules still apply, so you still can't take the Google wordmark and slap it on your company even if the logo is on Wikipedia Commons.

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

#144

A similar scourge of mine is Wikipedia contributors helpfully "tracing" company logos so they can be uploaded as vector graphics (great in theory!) but introducing all kinds of mistakes in the process or using the wrong fonts... also causing the wrong logos to spread all over the internet.

There's also nothing stopping the company itself submitting the correct logo. While, as far as I know, it's usually considered a conflict of interest to directly edit your own article as an organisation, you can upload the logo and request on the talk page of the article that correct image be used.

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

#145

Wikipedia had Brigham Young University listed as Michael Jackson's Alma mater for a year. The article on George Galloway, lists more lies and propaganda than a German speech, and they have NO plans to remove any of it. Wait until you see the article on the IBM PC. Wow. "Wikipedia was at fault." They are never at fault. They just host the largest collection of loud mouth opinionators on the planet: I have absolute an…

What happens when you just change the articles, and include a supporting citation? In the case of genuine errors, is there anybody actually arguing on the other side? I understand debates about whether or not things are worthy of inclusion (like unproved accusations), and there's a whole separate category of controversial viewpoints, but I've never come across meaningful pushback on unambiguous factual errors. You sh…

> In the case of genuine errors, is there anybody actually arguing on the other side?

Oh yeah, that happens if your edit goes against one of Wikipedia's sacred policies (they all are). I have that issue on the Dutch Wikipedia where a number of places in the bilingual province of Frisia shifted their official names to the Frisian variants instead of the Dutch, and where in one case in the course of three decades the old Dutch name dropped out of use completely¹ except for… Wikipedia, which relies on a single outdated (or misinterpreted) document published by the national language society. That Wikipedia branch has a policy which mandates the use of that document, so even though it is demonstrably showing an obsolete name, Wikipedia editors who like that status quo (often due to a dislike of regional languages and identity — this will be familiar to Welsh and Catalan folk too) will defend those 'facts' and slap anyone suggesting change with that policy document.

To my estimate changing a standing Wikipedia policy requires being a high-profile editor for at least a decade and investing around twenty hours a week for about half a year to garner enough support to change it. Most people just consider the Dutch Wikipedia a lost cause in this regard and give up. What's annoying is that Wikipedia is often taken as authoritative in terms of simple facts (like in the case of this flag), and factual errors leak out across the internet.

1: That is, you won't find the old names in the place itself, nor used (in Dutch, or any language) by the local residents, nor on its signage, nor on its municipal website, nor in the local media (or even national media mostly), nor on most maps, et cetera.

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

#146
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…

Your experience is much different than mine. It has been so often a waste of time that I've given up editing (or reading) Wikipedia.

Links or it didn’t happen.

I would be more charitable if it wasn’t for the fact that 99% of all claims of misdeeds on Wikipedia never give any links, or even sufficient details to find the offending edits.

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

#147
post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Constitution of Nepal has precise drawing instructions for their flag. See page 221: https://ag.gov.np/files/Constitution-of-Nepal_2072_Eng_www.m... Now of course you can't draw keys and tiara with Euclid-style instructions (in practice), but maybe countries should standardize their flag by publishing a canonical SVG file.

While the svg does have a standard rfc, imagine the rfc gets changed to invalidate the standard, and your flag is altered (or svg become incompatible). A technical drawing with ratios and CMY(K)/Pantone coloring would be a proper fit, though.

In that case a binary representation as png could help out. I can't imagine any conceivable event that would both invalidate svg and png standards.

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

#148

This raises deep philosophical questions about the nature of truth as it pertains to flags in particular. If everybody is using the wrong flag in real life (well, ok, online) while the correct flag is merely a blueprint, a shadow projected inside Plato's cave, what is true and what is wrong?

I think this was a very specific case of someone editing an image and introducing a mistake. Experts knew what the real flag should look like.

For example, if the name on my birth certificate is Steve but my forgetful friends keep calling me Bob, my actual true name does not change regardless of how many people say my name wrong.

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

#149

When our local fire department got a new fire engine the manufacturer placed the coat of arms of the town on the door. But instead of getting it from the municipality they used a grotesquely wrong version from Wikipedia.

This is funny.

I love how some people prefer internet searches to speaking with actual people for information.

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

#150

Accuracy is hard. As with many things, the first 90% takes 10% of the time, the last 10% takes 90%. Wikipedia seems filled with misinformation (or BS). I could imagine an obvious reason, that these volunteers with limited expertise and facility with the information (i.e., they aren't experts in the field who know all the sources well) write what they know. Also, it is up to Wikipedia's standard de facto , and most pe…

> the first 90% takes 10% of the time, the last 10% takes 90%.

Is the second part of that statement necessary?

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