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.
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.
> 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.
Additional: Blazons mostly concern themselves with the distinguishing element, the coat of arms on the escutcheon, with the external devices described mostly by reference – the papal tiara, an Earl’s coronet, a naval crown, etc. Mostly because in the heraldry of a European country these coronets were somewhat standardised – “everybody” knows that a duke’s coronet has acanthus/strawberry leaves – and for well-known crowns of sovereigns like the St. Edwards/Tudor crown, the Crown of St. Stephen, the Holy Roman Emperors Crown and of course the Papal Tiara developed over time well known depictions after their real likeness.
Pius XI didn’t bother to specify the tiara (the “triregnum”) in writing.
> La bandiera della Città del Vaticano è costituita da due campi divisi verticalmente, uno giallo aderente all'asta e l'altro bianco, e porta in questo ultimo la tiara colle chiavi, il tutto come al modello, che forma l'allegato A alla presente legge.
> Lo stemma è costituito dalla tiara colle chiavi, come al modello che forma l'allegato B alla presente legge.
> Il sigillo porta nel centro la tiara colle chiavi ed intorno le parole « Stato della Città del Vaticano », come al modello che forma l'allegato C alla presente legge.
Translated by Google:
> The flag of the Vatican City is made up of two vertically divided fields, one yellow adhering to the hoist and the other white, and in the latter bears the tiara with the keys, all as in the model, which forms attachment A to this law.
> The coat of arms consists of the tiara with the keys, as in the model which forms annex B to this law.
> The seal bears in the center the tiara with the keys and around the words "State of the Vatican City", as in the model which forms annex C to the present law.
From [1] – where the models in the annexes are printed in black and white.
Getting pixel-perfect representations from textual descriptions seems like a fool’s errand. The original sin, of course, was depicting the coat of arms on the flag, although that seems to be long practice for the preceding flags of the Papal States and institutions, as seen in the linked digital book on Vatican Flags [2] in the article, which features a multitude of different ancient depictions of the flag, often displaying the Papal Tiara’s inner lining in … red.
The illustration of the coat of arms is more helpful than it may appear, because it uses the heraldic conventions for indicating colours in engravings: the field (background) is gules (red), indicated by the vertical hatching; the keys are or (gold) and argent (silver) indicated by spotted hatching and plain 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.
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.
I thought that red didn’t touch black in the German flag, it touches sable, which is a fur. And furs can be placed on metal or color. … yeah, rules lawyering.
For secular states. The coat of arms of the Kingdom of Jerusalem used gold on silver. The coat of arms of the papacy on the other hand is not the flag so they can do whatever they feel like there.
Intentional in context, though – gold and silver allowed on each other for the Church and Jerusalem... and green frogs on red for Satan! (https://old.reddit.com/r/heraldry/comments/dd39tj/arms_of_sa...) (arguable, if you'd rather blazon the frogs as "proper", but...)
> “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.
Heraldic rules should apply to flags, insofar as it is centuries of graphic design knowledge about what can be distinguished from a distance, and in low-light.
Politics aside, the white-blue-white flag is simply a better design than the current flag of the Russian Federation, because color on metal is easier to distinguish. But the French tricolor looks great, because it follows the rules.
> I would have thought that should be gold and silver
The Vatican City flag (when also referencing the descriptions of elements imported from the coat of arms) uses yellow and white and gold and silver (and the gold and silver are on the white.
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.
Turkish constitution defines Turkish flag in terms of geometry. The founder of our republic was a mathematics enthusiast. He also had a book on teaching geometry although his main profession was being a soldier.
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.
Holy Roman Empire really doted on those heraldic signs, with England and a few others, too. In German, the word for the heraldry banner is "waffen" which is the same word for actual weapons. In English, to say "Coat of Arms" says the same thing, if I understand it.
“Arms” has the same two meanings as in German (see e.g. the College of Arms — hint: it’s not a place where they teach weaponry). “Coat” in this context refers to the actual coat worn by heralds representing the sovereign. The modern word for that outfit is “tabard” I believe.
The german word for coat of arms is „Wappen“. Etymologically that word is descended from „Waffen“, although the difference happened in the high middle ages.
That's because originally they were arms - it's how combatants would identify who was who on the battlefield based on what was painted on their shield and helmet.
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...).
I'd be willing to wager there's an endless discussion on the Talk page about this, where someone is arguing that the Vatican is wrong about their own flag, and they should be the ones to change.
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 pages. While it's anecdotal, I just checked and I've clocked nearly 800 edits in the past decade.
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.
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.
It used to have its own wiki article which was downgraded as the result of the lack of reputable newspapers making references to the Gell-Mann effect. Like if newspapers would ever push that concept in their columns...
There's a special place in hell for the Vatican. Pedo gay sex galore aside, the entire multi-billion dollar scammer organization, is disgusting. Went to visit while flying through. There's a long line in the square, it's sun-baking weather outside. They have the little roof-covered column things on the side, but the line is in the middle. No little tents over the line area - go ahead and stand there for 3 hours, at the zenith, in the middle of summer.
Well, burns and skin cancer, like tears inside the butt, bring you closer to god, as mother teresa always preached while on the scammin' trail, so all good - right? Nope, it's a sales tool. For a mere 300EUR you can bypass that line, and they have extremely rude and pushy sales people approach you multiple times as you suffer.
I gave up after 10 minutes. I took a selfie at their post office, now have a better story to tell, and my man-man virginity preserved. Although I probably would have been safe inside there, as I am an adult.
The special place in hell for that wiki editor, is called The Vatican. That whole area, the organization, and the people in it, are the definition of true and pure evil.
Wikipedia is trash, always has been. A small group of fanatics run that site and only allow information they deem acceptable. Using their information has always been a bad idea.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Well the article does show a photo of the wrong flag flying at (or very near to) the vatican. TBH I think the incorrect design looks better! But I suppose that's beside the point...
Wikipedia currently shows me the version with the white disk in the papal tiara, which the article asserts is the correct one. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Flag_of_the_Vatican_... suggests it's been that way since the 1st of January this year.
I see the correct one, and it hasn't changed since 1 January.
Regardless, that edit history is interesting because it suggests that the mistake (if it is one) goes back way further than Wikipedia. The very first upload (24 Nov 2005) had the red tiara, and was added with this comment:
> Flag of the Vatican City from the [http://openclipart.org/ Open Clip Art] website. {{PD-OpenClipart}} Category:SVG flags
Turn out I am just blind and had the wrong hue of yellow in mind.
But yes, it's quite interesting to watch some of the flag pages. Vexillologists constantly fighting over the correct flag.
One of the recent ones fixed was the Imperial Japanese flag. Watching that flag flip flop between 4 or 5 different iterations was amusing, to say the least.
To be fair, the wrong version is just a recolor and is more visually pleasing. The “red disk” is the inside of the tiara and makes the 3D shape more recognizable than the white version.
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.
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, a dried-out octopus, a Shar-Pei with a snake for a nose, and nothing like a rhinoceros, respectively. (The last one was never really fixed and we stole the horn of a narwhal and made up a whole imaginary animal rather than admit we got it wrong. Still pissed that Scotland doesn’t have rhinoceros as a symbol because it would suit their nightlife so much better than a unicorn.)
This was so bad that people, at least those who cared about heraldry, had to agree that the difference between a lion and a leopard was that one was looking straight at the viewer and the other looked right (which famously is left because of how shields work).
This long introduction to say: Symbols have to be recognizable, but their specific design isn’t part of what makes a flag a flag. Yesterday, someone asked r/vexillology which one among 10(!) was the proper flag for the Isle of Man. If you haven’t seen it, it’s red (gules) with the symbol of the island, the triskele: “three legs in armour flexed at the knee and conjoined at the thigh, all proper, garnished and spurred”. I can’t imagine a more specific description, and yet: 10 different armours, feet extension, spurs… All valid, all different. Anyone who cares about medieval armours will tell you: the complexity of protecting a fighter in battle with 15th-century forging techniques makes vexillologists look like children playing with Duplo bricks in comparison. We are never getting a photo-exact triskele, not without going beyond what that symbol is meant to be: recognizable.
This hits personally because my family colours are extremely simple but impossible to draw: it’s “silver (white) with a brewer’s pole.” Sound simple? Yeah, if anyone knew what a brewer pole is meant to look like. I won’t bore you with emails with my uncles, but let’s say there’s a new version every time anyone responds. We’ve seen anything from a club, a broom, a rake to something that is best described as an old-school TV antenna.
I think some creative license is welcome in that case.
Since Pope Francis has rejected the heavy triple crown for a more symbolic tiara (a silver mitre with three connected golden lines, like this: 王). It makes sense that the flag has adapted, and some flags and some coats of arms in Rome have that design. But that (much bigger and symbolically enormous) inconsistency isn’t raised by Father Becker, who prefers to point out that, while every Papal vestment is coated in white, while personal effects are velveted in red, as the tiara is part of a sacrament… Sure, technically true, but this is a conversation about papal underwear——literally.
More generally the design of the keys, the flowing of the stole even the motif embroidered on it, all can be adapted without betraying who the Pope is. The only real things that matter are: having three crowns (or a liturgical equivalent) and that the two keys are of different colours.
For example, I’ve even seen one very committed designer change the colour of the stole based on the liturgical calendar (for the miscreants who are inexplicably still reading: stoles can be green, white, red, or purple, depending on the day or the occasion —— and nerds will add blue to that list). As absurd as the idea of a flag changing colour every day can seem, it makes sense. Can you imagine if the flag of your country had the tiniest difference if you were in mourning?
The carpet in the Oval Office has the Great Seal of the United States: the Eagle with the start-spangled shield. Famously, the Eagle looks left, towards the olive branch, to symbolise the country’s historical prefer...
> 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.
> the carpet can be switched if the country is at war
"There is a temple to him in Rome, which has two doors, and which they call the gate of war. It is the custom to open the temple in time of war, and to close it during peace. This scarcely ever took place, as the empire was almost always at war with some state."
Mmmm, the Prime Example of color space hell. I'd bet these people never seen it correctly on monitor since I don't think any single of them ever had calibrated display (if i'm wrong i apologize). Pointless and priceless until it gets serious and then, wait for it, printed! Which is whole another step of brain-melting-difficulty in getting it correct. (wikipedia reverters [in this scenario] are) Laughable at least, thanks, made my day. The difference in versions from 2014 (compared to later ones) is completely hilarious. Enjoy while you can!
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.
You didn't even bother following the link to the Twitter thread.
The photo of the Apollo 11 display shown in the thread was taken from Wikimedia Commons, uploaded in 2008 [0].
The other one, with Pope Benedict seated next to a red-tiara'd flag comes from archivio.quirinale.it, the official archives of the Italian presidency [1].
> So its obviously not just wikipedias invention, but a wider phenomenon.
That doesn't make a difference, IMO. There were all sorts of wrong statements before wikipedia, but it wouldn't reflect well on wikipedia if they presented them.
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.
> It's hard to imagine the flag flown at the UN being done as a rush job from a Wikipedia article.
Maybe the UN has their buttons on, but at the Olympics, displaying the wrong flag, an incorrect flag or the right flag upside-down happens now and then.
I imagine so, but in this instance the flag is a big stinking deal because the UN had just allowed the flags of Palestine and the Vatican (Observer States) to be flown for the very first time. This wasn't a case of "we've got to print out flags for every single country and fly them all at once", these two flags were given special attention.
Also note my edit: the Twitter thread zokier found shows Benedict XVI seated next to a red-tiara'd flag in 2005, as well as the one that was sent to the moon in 1969.
> Kazakhstan won the game but lost the award ceremony. A parody of the country's national anthem was played by mistake after a Kazakh athlete won a gold medal. Organizers of the shooting competition in Kuwait are apologizing for playing the Kazakhstan anthem from the comedy movie Borat.
> It's hard to imagine the flag flown at the UN being done as a rush job from a Wikipedia article.
I imagine, given enough time, graphical equivalent of citogenesis[0] might kick in. Even assuming that, and that in a hypothetical reality, the Internet somehow confused both the UN and Vatican officials as to what the Vatican flag was, at some point you're better off just making it official and letting kids 50 years later have a laugh when learning about it on history lessons.
> It's hard to imagine the flag flown at the UN being done as a rush job from a Wikipedia article.
After working years for a famous international company where anyone from the outside would imagine incredible efficiency, precision, mastery, etc., it is really not hard AT ALL to believe.
Yeah, what this really shows is that flags are not nearly as precise as we sometimes imagine them to me.
For instance, most old heraldic crests and flags have their official formats described in plain text: "Blazon or, three lions passant guardant azure, langued and armed gules." That's the final word on the matter. It's then up to the flag maker to read that and create it correctly.
This can result in flags that look subtly different, with variations in how lions or whatever were drawn. Google "Royal Banner of Scotland" and you'll see a number of variations in how the red lion is drawn. Ditto, say, "Coat of arms of Finland."
These days those Google searches will show more and more the same images, with the Wikipedia effect (or general internet) but you can still find a wealth of examples of how different they used to be.
Having just read a bit about what the heraldry rules are and the purpose they serve, it strikes me as very similar to the design ideas of transit maps in modern times. You want the lines to be easily distinguishable, certain colors shouldn't run side by side (so the conventional wisdom says), you choose only from a minimalist simple pallet. In most places, the maps are diagrammatic, the lines can be arranged in any way so long as they connect the right stations in the right order. Convergent evolution.
They link to this dude’s Vatican flag site [0] that has the 2023 version [1] which is a mix of the "correct" (it might be the correct pre-2023 version) and "incorrect" version (2023 seems to have yellow, not bronze, keys, white tiara). I’m left with still not knowing what the real flag is, if Wikipedia is now right, and why the article writer wrote so much without doing any real research.
I guess the edit war would need to be conclusively resolved before the Wikipedia page is update to reflect it? Wikipedia proceduralism is always confusing to me.
Accuracy is hard. As with many things, the first 90% takes 10% of the time, the last 10% takes 90%.
Wikipedia seems filled with <90% accurate information, which is 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 people don't go beyond that norm.
Instead of lots of people providing <90% accurate misinfo, we need a few people producing 99.999% accurate info. (Seriously, if you are producing <90% accurate info, stop. The Internet has infinite amounts of it, if there was ever a marginal benefit to it, we don't need more now.)
It's easy to copy and share accurate info, in theory, rather than creating or sharing more BS. The other problem is that such info is often placed behind paywalls; the intellectual elite get it, but not the public. If you want an accurate science info, look at McGraw-Hill's AccessScience (the decendent of their leading Encyclopedia of Science and Technology), "written by world-renowned scientists, including 46 Nobel Prize Laureates" - not exactly Wikipedia. Unfortunately, you'll probably need an institutional subscriptioin. Who cares if high school kids (or anyone else) have accurate info?
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[ 6.1 ms ] story [ 212 ms ] threadNot 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...
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.
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.
I never thought an opportunity to show Laser Kiwi would come up here.
https://nzhistory.govt.nz/media/photo/fire-lazar
Every game I see up to 3 other flags for the other players, and the country name is shown on mouse-over.
It even taught me of the existence a country I'd never heard of before.
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.
Pius XI didn’t bother to specify the tiara (the “triregnum”) in writing.
> La bandiera della Città del Vaticano è costituita da due campi divisi verticalmente, uno giallo aderente all'asta e l'altro bianco, e porta in questo ultimo la tiara colle chiavi, il tutto come al modello, che forma l'allegato A alla presente legge.
> Lo stemma è costituito dalla tiara colle chiavi, come al modello che forma l'allegato B alla presente legge.
> Il sigillo porta nel centro la tiara colle chiavi ed intorno le parole « Stato della Città del Vaticano », come al modello che forma l'allegato C alla presente legge.
Translated by Google:
> The flag of the Vatican City is made up of two vertically divided fields, one yellow adhering to the hoist and the other white, and in the latter bears the tiara with the keys, all as in the model, which forms attachment A to this law.
> The coat of arms consists of the tiara with the keys, as in the model which forms annex B to this law.
> The seal bears in the center the tiara with the keys and around the words "State of the Vatican City", as in the model which forms annex C to the present law.
From [1] – where the models in the annexes are printed in black and white.
[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20131217230421/http://www.unirom...
Getting pixel-perfect representations from textual descriptions seems like a fool’s errand. The original sin, of course, was depicting the coat of arms on the flag, although that seems to be long practice for the preceding flags of the Papal States and institutions, as seen in the linked digital book on Vatican Flags [2] in the article, which features a multitude of different ancient depictions of the flag, often displaying the Papal Tiara’s inner lining in … red.
[2] https://nava.org/raven-volume-25
(Edit: fixed quote formatting)
The illustration of the coat of arms is more helpful than it may appear, because it uses the heraldic conventions for indicating colours in engravings: the field (background) is gules (red), indicated by the vertical hatching; the keys are or (gold) and argent (silver) indicated by spotted hatching and plain white.
The diagram indicates the lining of the tiara is argent, unlike the depiction of the arms on Wikipedia https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coats_of_arms_of_the_Holy_Se...
In real life the lining of the tiara of Benedict XVI is white https://orbiscatholicussecundus.blogspot.com/2011/05/new-pap...
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 proposed that, in some circumstances, white should be considered a heraldic colour, distinct from argent”, so who knows? Maybe it is gold and white.
Edit: https://www.vaticanstate.va/it/stato-governo/note-generali/b... says “un drappo bipartito di giallo (verso l’asta) e di bianco”, so the Vatican itself says it’s yellow and white.
(Interestingly, there’s a convention for converting those colors to monochrome: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tincture_(heraldry)#Monochroma...)
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.
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.
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.
Politics aside, the white-blue-white flag is simply a better design than the current flag of the Russian Federation, because color on metal is easier to distinguish. But the French tricolor looks great, because it follows the rules.
The Vatican City flag (when also referencing the descriptions of elements imported from the coat of arms) uses yellow and white and gold and silver (and the gold and silver are on the white.
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.
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...).
Few remain but at least one that is still there is now in multiple articles and actual books.
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. :/
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 pages. While it's anecdotal, I just checked and I've clocked nearly 800 edits in the past decade.
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...)
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.
I generally support the need for evidence, but I have only so much time. And I saw many, many instances of this behavior.
Well, burns and skin cancer, like tears inside the butt, bring you closer to god, as mother teresa always preached while on the scammin' trail, so all good - right? Nope, it's a sales tool. For a mere 300EUR you can bypass that line, and they have extremely rude and pushy sales people approach you multiple times as you suffer.
I gave up after 10 minutes. I took a selfie at their post office, now have a better story to tell, and my man-man virginity preserved. Although I probably would have been safe inside there, as I am an adult.
The special place in hell for that wiki editor, is called The Vatican. That whole area, the organization, and the people in it, are the definition of true and pure evil.
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.
> Patent and trademark rights are not licensed under this Public License.
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.
For whatever reason, my computer is rendering the wrong shade of yellow.
You can see the previous edit/revert war that was happening on the image itself here: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Flag_of_the_Vatican_...
Previous text: ->Unfortunately, the correction to the flag has been reverted, and the vatican flag on wikipedia is now incorrect. Again.<-
Regardless, that edit history is interesting because it suggests that the mistake (if it is one) goes back way further than Wikipedia. The very first upload (24 Nov 2005) had the red tiara, and was added with this comment:
> Flag of the Vatican City from the [http://openclipart.org/ Open Clip Art] website. {{PD-OpenClipart}} Category:SVG flags
But yes, it's quite interesting to watch some of the flag pages. Vexillologists constantly fighting over the correct flag.
One of the recent ones fixed was the Imperial Japanese flag. Watching that flag flip flop between 4 or 5 different iterations was amusing, to say the least.
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?
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.
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, a dried-out octopus, a Shar-Pei with a snake for a nose, and nothing like a rhinoceros, respectively. (The last one was never really fixed and we stole the horn of a narwhal and made up a whole imaginary animal rather than admit we got it wrong. Still pissed that Scotland doesn’t have rhinoceros as a symbol because it would suit their nightlife so much better than a unicorn.)
This was so bad that people, at least those who cared about heraldry, had to agree that the difference between a lion and a leopard was that one was looking straight at the viewer and the other looked right (which famously is left because of how shields work).
This long introduction to say: Symbols have to be recognizable, but their specific design isn’t part of what makes a flag a flag. Yesterday, someone asked r/vexillology which one among 10(!) was the proper flag for the Isle of Man. If you haven’t seen it, it’s red (gules) with the symbol of the island, the triskele: “three legs in armour flexed at the knee and conjoined at the thigh, all proper, garnished and spurred”. I can’t imagine a more specific description, and yet: 10 different armours, feet extension, spurs… All valid, all different. Anyone who cares about medieval armours will tell you: the complexity of protecting a fighter in battle with 15th-century forging techniques makes vexillologists look like children playing with Duplo bricks in comparison. We are never getting a photo-exact triskele, not without going beyond what that symbol is meant to be: recognizable.
This hits personally because my family colours are extremely simple but impossible to draw: it’s “silver (white) with a brewer’s pole.” Sound simple? Yeah, if anyone knew what a brewer pole is meant to look like. I won’t bore you with emails with my uncles, but let’s say there’s a new version every time anyone responds. We’ve seen anything from a club, a broom, a rake to something that is best described as an old-school TV antenna.
I think some creative license is welcome in that case.
Since Pope Francis has rejected the heavy triple crown for a more symbolic tiara (a silver mitre with three connected golden lines, like this: 王). It makes sense that the flag has adapted, and some flags and some coats of arms in Rome have that design. But that (much bigger and symbolically enormous) inconsistency isn’t raised by Father Becker, who prefers to point out that, while every Papal vestment is coated in white, while personal effects are velveted in red, as the tiara is part of a sacrament… Sure, technically true, but this is a conversation about papal underwear——literally.
More generally the design of the keys, the flowing of the stole even the motif embroidered on it, all can be adapted without betraying who the Pope is. The only real things that matter are: having three crowns (or a liturgical equivalent) and that the two keys are of different colours.
For example, I’ve even seen one very committed designer change the colour of the stole based on the liturgical calendar (for the miscreants who are inexplicably still reading: stoles can be green, white, red, or purple, depending on the day or the occasion —— and nerds will add blue to that list). As absurd as the idea of a flag changing colour every day can seem, it makes sense. Can you imagine if the flag of your country had the tiniest difference if you were in mourning?
The carpet in the Oval Office has the Great Seal of the United States: the Eagle with the start-spangled shield. Famously, the Eagle looks left, towards the olive branch, to symbolise the country’s historical prefer...
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-...
"There is a temple to him in Rome, which has two doors, and which they call the gate of war. It is the custom to open the temple in time of war, and to close it during peace. This scarcely ever took place, as the empire was almost always at war with some state."
- Parallel Lives
I love how some people prefer internet searches to speaking with actual people for information.
So its obviously not just wikipedias invention, but a wider phenomenon.
The photo of the Apollo 11 display shown in the thread was taken from Wikimedia Commons, uploaded in 2008 [0].
The other one, with Pope Benedict seated next to a red-tiara'd flag comes from archivio.quirinale.it, the official archives of the Italian presidency [1].
[0] https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Vatican_City_lun...
[1] https://archivio.quirinale.it/image-h/Ciampi/grandi_immagini...
https://twitter.com/scheeko/status/1639673883719618562
It's one of the 139 images linked from here:
https://archivio.quirinale.it/aspr/diari/EVENT-002-021416/pr...
Named:
ASPR_SG-USC_09-SCALFARO_f2603_0094_ST.jpg
On the right from the Pope John Paul II and the flag with the red detail is Oscar Luigi Scalfaro, the president of Italy from 1992 to 1999.
Noted in that discussion by Francisco Feijó Delgado, @scheeko Mar 25, 2023.
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2...
That doesn't make a difference, IMO. There were all sorts of wrong statements before wikipedia, but it wouldn't reflect well on wikipedia if they presented them.
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
Maybe the UN has their buttons on, but at the Olympics, displaying the wrong flag, an incorrect flag or the right flag upside-down happens now and then.
Also note my edit: the Twitter thread zokier found shows Benedict XVI seated next to a red-tiara'd flag in 2005, as well as the one that was sent to the moon in 1969.
https://www.npr.org/2012/03/23/149244038/ceremony-plays-bora...
> Kazakhstan won the game but lost the award ceremony. A parody of the country's national anthem was played by mistake after a Kazakh athlete won a gold medal. Organizers of the shooting competition in Kuwait are apologizing for playing the Kazakhstan anthem from the comedy movie Borat.
It's a meta-screw up. Apt.
I imagine, given enough time, graphical equivalent of citogenesis[0] might kick in. Even assuming that, and that in a hypothetical reality, the Internet somehow confused both the UN and Vatican officials as to what the Vatican flag was, at some point you're better off just making it official and letting kids 50 years later have a laugh when learning about it on history lessons.
--
[0] - https://xkcd.com/978/
After working years for a famous international company where anyone from the outside would imagine incredible efficiency, precision, mastery, etc., it is really not hard AT ALL to believe.
and the WaybackMachine confirms it's been there since at least Jan 2002: https://web.archive.org/web/20020112222602/http://www.vatica...
edit: Also the very first version of Wikipedia's Vatican City flag uploaded in 2005 also had a red tiara! It only stopped being red in 2013: https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=File:Flag_of... (look for the 1st upload in the history)
(side note: the Vatican keeping the same URLs up for 2+ decades is a refreshing change of pace!)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36121563
For instance, most old heraldic crests and flags have their official formats described in plain text: "Blazon or, three lions passant guardant azure, langued and armed gules." That's the final word on the matter. It's then up to the flag maker to read that and create it correctly.
This can result in flags that look subtly different, with variations in how lions or whatever were drawn. Google "Royal Banner of Scotland" and you'll see a number of variations in how the red lion is drawn. Ditto, say, "Coat of arms of Finland."
These days those Google searches will show more and more the same images, with the Wikipedia effect (or general internet) but you can still find a wealth of examples of how different they used to be.
[0] https://mnflag.tripod.com/vatflag/
[1] https://mnflag.tripod.com/vatflag/official-models1.png
Can't really blame them though, since the Indian government does the same. https://www.india.gov.in/india-glance/national-symbols
I imagine the other will be changed once there is a consensus, but it seems they're having trouble getting a definitive answer from the government.
I guess the edit war would need to be conclusively resolved before the Wikipedia page is update to reflect it? Wikipedia proceduralism is always confusing to me.
Wikipedia seems filled with <90% accurate information, which is 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 people don't go beyond that norm.
Instead of lots of people providing <90% accurate misinfo, we need a few people producing 99.999% accurate info. (Seriously, if you are producing <90% accurate info, stop. The Internet has infinite amounts of it, if there was ever a marginal benefit to it, we don't need more now.)
It's easy to copy and share accurate info, in theory, rather than creating or sharing more BS. The other problem is that such info is often placed behind paywalls; the intellectual elite get it, but not the public. If you want an accurate science info, look at McGraw-Hill's AccessScience (the decendent of their leading Encyclopedia of Science and Technology), "written by world-renowned scientists, including 46 Nobel Prize Laureates" - not exactly Wikipedia. Unfortunately, you'll probably need an institutional subscriptioin. Who cares if high school kids (or anyone else) have accurate info?
Is the second part of that statement necessary?
But I do live in slovenia, and everyone mistakes us for slovakia anyways, and that includes our flags.