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

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-one process; the same blazon can result in various visual representations, and which one is selected is often an aesthetic consideration.

Not speaking Italian, and not having done the historical digging, I don't know the original written definition of the Vatican flag, but it looks like it's something like "banner divided in yellow (towards the flagpole) and white, with the white part centered with the crossed keys surmounted by the tiara," where the "crossed keys" and "tiara" are imports of external symbology. In this case, the question concerns the tiara [1] -- which, like most physical tiaras, has a hole running through it that appears neither red nor white when viewed as it is represented on the flag.

While it is certainly reasonable for the Vatican to have preferences on the detailed representation of this flag, both as-drawn versions are faithful representations of the blazon, both allow looking up the blazon from the visual representation, and both are, frankly, fine.

[1] https://www.vatican.va/news_services/press/documentazione/do...

While widely used symbols like “eagle displayed” or “lion passant guardant” are really well defined, the more you get to the esoteric stuff the more you find there are really no standards. Try “importing” such thing as “octopus proper”.

Heraldically speaking, it really makes no difference, as nobody would mistake the “wrong” flag of Vatican to represent some completely different entity. But TLA is not implying that — just asking for some more standardization of a widely-used symbol.

Wikipedia is too often the final source of truth for people. While I'm not saying it's intentionally wrong very often, but accidental wrongs get repeated elsewhere. It happens especially with things like the Vatican flag ("Surely Wikipedians haven't fabricated some alternate version?").

Another example: The Windows Me logo (yes, seriously). At the bottom of the stylized "Me" are the words "Millennium Edition"; Wikipedians like to recreate logos into vector format. Unfortunately, someone had misspelled those words to say "Millenium Edition" instead. I personally fixed that image, but I still see the misspelled version crop up from time to time in articles, YouTube videos, etc (how are they still getting the wrong version? I don't know...).

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. :/

> While it is certainly reasonable for the Vatican to have preferences on the detailed representation of this flag, both as-drawn versions are faithful representations of the blazon

It obviously has an actual color (which might be red or white, but: (1) the tiara is not a unique physical object, there are multiple of them, and they may differ on this point, (2) weirdly, while there are lots of photographs, including of them in displays where that angle would be visible in person, I can’t find any actually photographed of any iterations showing the actual color, and (3) while stock art of coat of arms design (without the field) also has the red just as debated flag design does, the actual coat of arms does not specify red as a feature of the tiara and the red shown in the actual coat of arms there is the red of the field (which would not be visible if the field were a physical background and the tiara a physical object, but armorial designs aren’t constrained by physical representation.)

So I suspect both the flag image in question and common stock art of the Vatican Coat of Arms design without the field are importing part of the field of the coat of arms (which is, explicitly, red [gules]) as if it were part of the tiara.