Commons:WikiProject Flags

    
WikiProject Flags

The WikiProject Flags, by analogy with the English Wikipedia's WikiProjects, is intended to collect all kinds of information about uploading flags here on the Commons. The goal of this project is to have high-quality SVG representations of all national and subnational flags, as well as historical flags.

Participants

• Ætoms (talk)
• Alexphangia (talk)
• Alkari (talk)
• BringmeFacebooksbold (talk)
• Cradel (talk)
• Dbenbenn (talk)
• Denelson83 (talk)
• Greentubing (talk)
• Hoshie (talk)
• Illegitimate Barrister (talk)
• Joey-das-WBF (talk)
• Keepscases (talk)
• Kookaburra (talk)
• Lordjonesbowes
• MarianSigler (talk)
• Mattes (talk)
• Melromero (talk)
• Mysid (talk)
• Nichalp (talk)
• Nickshanks (talk)
• Nightstallion (talk)
• Niklitov (talk)
• Nokka (talk)
• Oren neu dag (talk)
• Savissivik (talk)
• Smooth O (talk)
• UberHalogen (talk)
• Vzb83 (talk)
• Yaddah (talk)
• Zscout370 (talk)

Contributing

"How do I contribute?", you ask? OpenClipart.org has a lot of public domain flags. The xrmap flags collection, flags-2.9-src.tar.bz2, has some flags that OpenClipart lacks.

Besides uploading flags, you can also help improve flags. Many of the SVG flags here are inaccurate or poor quality. See the talk page for more information. Also, many flags were drawn freehand in tools such as inkscape. That means the positioning might be slightly off, even if the flag looks good. For example, the first version of File:Flag of Armenia.svg had the stripes shifted down by 0.00002 pixels.

Finally, you can help replace PNG flags with SVG flags on the various Wikimedia projects; the use of bots may be advisable in many circumstances.

Naming convention

The convention is to use "Flag of FOO.svg", where the English Wikipedia article about the flag is named "Flag of FOO". For example, File:European flag.svg is named for w:European flag, File:Flag of Europe.svg is named for w:Flag of Europe, and File:Flag of the People's Republic of China.svg is not named "Flag of China.svg". If there is no article about a specific flag, use common sense; for example, if there are different flags for civil use and state use, one should have the standard name Flag of FOO.svg while the other one should be named Flag of FOO (state).svg.

For flag variants, replace "Flag of" in the filename with one of the following strings (case sensitive):

• Civil Air Ensign of
• Civil Ensign of
• Civil Jack of
• Flag of the President of
• Flag of the Prime Minister of
• Government Ensign of
• Government Jack of
• Naval Ensign of
• Naval Jack of
• Royal Standard of

If a flag is only used on a de facto basis, you may add the string "(local)" to the filename.

Image size

In theory, an SVG image has infinite size, since it can be scaled to any size. Nevertheless, an SVG file has a so-called "natural size". With the |thumb image syntax ([[Image:Example.svg|thumb]]) MediaWiki refuses to scale an SVG image up. For that reason, all flags must be at least 300px wide (300px is the largest thumbnail size that can be selected in Special:Preferences#prefsection-3).

It is also nice if a flag is at least 1280px wide. That way the image displayed on the image description page will be as large as the user requests in Special:Preferences. (1280px is the largest thumbnail size that MediaWiki will produce, regardless of the flag's natural size.)

Finally, it is good for an SVG flag to not be much larger than 1280px. Firefox can display SVG files directly, but it only shows them at the natural size. If the natural size is huge, Firefox will use a tremendous amount of memory trying to display the image. Other web browsers (based on Chromium or WebKit) attempt to display SVG files at their natural size, but render them in a container that will rescale them so that they fit the browser's window, allowing users to zoom in/out, pan or scroll on them in their UI, without needing lot of memory in their rendering canvas (they dynamically render only the visible part and can maintain a stored cache each zoom level for efficient scrolling/panning). This limitation of Firefox for large images may change later.

Colors

Many flag specifications include references to the PANTONE color system. PANTONE's Color Finder serves a webpage when given a color code; the HTML source can then be examined to extract the appropriate RGB values. But this is really not recommended, because this system is not intended for digital usage, because it's a printing color palette, there is no accurate or official standardized converter.

It is recommended to use the color palette from the FIAV for rendering flags on displays. However it is not a international standard but a proposal from a public discussion, with variants for specific vexillology groups. The default generic variant (as implemented and documented in {{Tincture}}, which lists other variants) is:

GPLtab Generic

Tincture (GN)

InfoField

argentargent-dorazurecélestecarnationcendréegulesnaranjapurpuresabletennévert

#
  255 255 255 #FFFFFF argent
  231 231 231 #E7E7E7 argent-d
  252 221   9 #FCDD09 or
   15  71 175 #0F47AF azure
  137 197 227 #89C5E3 céleste
  242 167 114 #F2A772 carnation
  153 153 153 #999999 cendrée
  218  18  26 #DA121A gules
  235 119  17 #EB7711 naranja
  145  22 161 #9116A1 purpure
    0   0   0 #000000 sable
  157  83  51 #9D5333 tenné
    7 137  48 #078930 vert