Commons:WikiProject Flags

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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.

Contents

[edit] Participants

[edit] 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 Image: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.

[edit] Naming convention

Because image redirects don't work, and images can't be renamed, it is important to choose the right title when uploading a flag. The convention is to use "Flag of FOO.svg", where the English Wikipedia article about the flag is named "Flag of FOO". For example, Image:European flag.svg is named for w:European flag, Image:Flag of Europe.svg is named for w:Flag of Europe, and Image: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" in the filename with one of the following strings (case sensitive):

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

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

[edit] 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 1024px wide. That way the image displayed on the image description page will be as large as the user requests in Special:Preferences. (1024px is the largest thumbnail size that MediaWiki will produce, regardless of the flag's natural size.)

Finally, it is good for a flag to not be much larger than 1024px. 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.

[edit] Colors

Many flag specifications include references to the PANTONE color system. PANTONE's Color Finder at http://www.pantone.com/pages/pantone/colorfinder.aspx serves a webpage when given a color code; the HTML source can then be examined to extract the appropriate RGB values.

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