Flag historical accuracy and ‘browse the catalogue by time period’

Dear catalogue administrators,

First of all thank you for all your effort in building this platform. Numista is a knowledge base not only for experts and enthusiasts, but also for anyone who is interested to learn more about World History.
Numista helps us recognize and appreciate the culture and aesthetics of different nations and historic periods, contributing to all of us having a broader, less national-centred vision of the world.
It also helps us realize that nations and empires can rise and fall, and how this is invariably correlated to the good use or mismanagement of money by those in charge of issuing it, which is a subject becoming more and more relevant in our days.
 

As such, and in the spirit of creating a platform ‘built by the community for the community’, I would like to suggest a catalogue structure improvement that would definitely increase the user-friendliness and overall historical accuracy of the platform.
That improvement would allow the proper and correct usage of flags in the ‘browse the catalogue by issuer’ feature, avoiding any historical inaccuracies and misrepresentations. This could also lead to allowing users to ’browse the catalogue by time period’, which would also be a very interesting additional feature to the website.
For example, my country is Portugal and its current flag has been in use since 1910, the year when the 1st Portuguese republic was born. Before that here were about fifteen other official national flags, going back to the beginning of the country and its monarchy in 1146. And during the Iberian Union (from 1580 to 1640), although Portugal and Spain had their own territory flags, the Union had its own flag.
This means using an icon of the Portuguese Republic flag to categorize a period from 1146 to our days inaccurate to say the least, and you might as well not use any icons at all instead of using this sort of ‘lazy’ approach in a website that is primarily focused on transmitting reliable and accurate information based on well documented sources.
Another example dear to me is Brazil. Brazil declared its independency from Portugal in 1822, so before that both Portugal and Brazil shared the same national flag, as well as Angola, Mozambique, Portuguese Guinea, Portuguese India, Portuguese Timor, and Macau; these territories all had their own territorial flags, and should be considered subsections of Portugal until their independence or absorption by other countries.
I know this might stir the feelings of those who are more prone to distorting or denying certain historical facts, but correctly and objectively identifying the issuer of a currency is what Numista is all about, and we all expect Numista to take a neutral stance in these matters and not cave in to political correctness or other types of external pressure capable of eroding the accuracy and objectiveness of its knowledge base.
 

So, in practical terms, this would imply allowing each database entry to have following fields, each one with a validity period from dd-mm-yyyy to dd-mm-yyyy:
1. Official name of the country (at least in English and on its original language)
2. Official name of the issuer (at least in English and on its original language)
3. Official country flag (with a pre-defined minimum / maximum resolution and format, and an iconized version of it)
4. Official name of the territory (if applicable and as a subsection of the country, at least in English and on its original language)
5. Official territory flag (if applicable and as a subsection of the country flag)

Best regards,

As I'm a flag nerd myself, of course I love the idea, but just imagine the mess of e.g. Afghanistan, who had 37 different flags (excluding varieties) since 1900, and 18 different flags (excluding varieties) since 1980. How would these be represented?

The way I see it, each coin or banknote issued in a certain year should have a certain flag associated to it. If a flag doesn't exist or wasn’t used in that period, leave it blank. If there are doubts about which one applies, or there are several varieties of the same flag, or even a picture of the exact same flag but with higher of lower image quality, upvotes/downvotes would solve the issue, and the flag with the most upvotes would be shown first. Catalogue administrators could/would approve or reject flags to avoid any trolling.

I think the country must display only the last flag used (as now), and the new enhancement will add/associate to each ruling authority or period the flags used in those years (can be one or more by period).

OK, let’s assume you use as criteria for your structure the 193 states that currently have a seat in the UN, and you use their current flag to represent that section.
Inside each of those 193 sections you would find subsections with the different historical flags that were used during a certain period and political regime, as well as any dependent territories.
But what happens to the states that no longer exist or that have significantly changed their geographical borders? Would you include the Roman Empire as a subsection of today’s Italy? The Soviet Union as a subsection of today’s Russia? Would you include Czechoslovakia as a subsection of the Czech Republic, as a subsection of Slovakia, or as a subsection of both?
Why not just be historically accurate and assume that some things shouldn’t be oversimplified, sacrificing historical accuracy for the sake of convenience?

I referred to without changing the current structure of countries and territories, this

davidhs

I think the country must display only the last flag used (as now)

is this list https://en.numista.com/catalogue/index.php?ct=coin

There are countries with only one flag, some countries are related to each other and are grouped. For example,

• Livonia and Estonia
• Russia
• Russian Caucasia
• Russian Empire
• Siberia
• Soviet Union
• Tannu Tuva
• Taurida Governorate

are grouped in Russia. 

Perhaps the Russie of first level should not have flag, because is a group name, not a real country, I do not know.

An example of this

davidhs

the new enhancement will add/associate to each ruling authority or period the flags used in those years (can be one or more by period).

can be, for Soviet Union, add flags to periods:

• Russian SFSR (1917-1922)
  1917-1918 1918 1918-1922
• Soviet Union (1922-1991)
  1922-1923 1923-1924  
  1924-1936 1936-1955  
  1955-1991

(can be too many flags, perhaps one animated gif…)

Source:

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flag_of_Russia
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flag_of_the_Russian_Soviet_Federative_Socialist_Republic
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flag_of_the_Soviet_Union

I think we can agree on some points:
1 – The current structure of countries and territories doesn’t seem to use any clear, consistent or historically accurate criteria for its organization;
2 – The first level should not have a flag, because it’s a group name, a generalization used for convenience that does not necessarily represent an existing, geographically fixed/static country;
3 – The second level (subsections) should associate to each ruling authority a particular ruling period (from dd-mm-yyyy to dd-mm-yyyy) and the respective flag(s) used during that period;
4 – If a certain period has several flag versions or variants, or by some reason there is controversy on which one is the correct one, a system of upvotes/downvotes would solve the issue. The flag that most users would consider as correct/best quality would be the one shown first, although you could click and see the other versions ordered from most to least upvotes minus downvotes.

Hello,
I made a change so that it's now possible to define different flags for different periods.
See for example the coins from Sri Lanka, with 5 different flags: https://en.numista.com/catalogue/ceylan-1.html?o=r

There are still some limitations:

• The granularity is by ruling authority or period. It's not possible to have more than one flag per ruling authority or to respect the exact dates of use of each flag.
• Formatting the flags is time consuming. I did it only for the various periods of Sri Lanka and for Zaire so far. If some flags are important to you, please make a request in the forum section for the coin catalogue, with the checkbox for ruling authority modification. It will help if you can clearly mention which flag should be assigned to which ruler, and if possible provide the flag in the right format (see here).

A good progress, we can see it on coins, but what about this part:

It would be nice to have it directly on this place.

Indomini16

A good progress, we can see it on coins, but what about this part:

 

It would be nice to have it directly on this place.

+1

Hello,

I'm not sure there is much benefit in showing the flag next to the ruler. It's quite uncommon to represent rulers by a flag, so I'm not sure it would facilitate anything. Also, Numista has defined a flag for only a couple of rulers; having flags only showing up only for some rulers or for some issuers may be disturbing. 

I mean for period, in this case it would be only at Ceylon level.

I fear this would be misleading as well, while not adding much value. The flag for Ceylon is clearly British while the first two periods below refer to Portuguese and Dutch occupation. 

Hello Xavier,
First of all, thank you for your time and effort in this matter.
I think it what you propose makes sense : for each ruling authority, there’s one period and one flag associated to it. I imagine that there might be cases where that’s not historically accurate, but for the sake of simplicity, it’s an understandable limitation that nevertheless is a clear improvement compared to the previous situation, where there was no choice but to see the most recent flag of a country representing all of its past History.
As you mentioned, formatting all the flags to a specific format that needs manual work is very time consuming, and there are many hundreds of flags that would need to be reviewed and formatted. In practical terms, this would mean implementing a very time consuming feature that, in my opinion, isn’t really that great, useful or even valued by the users in general.
I understand that it’s hard to change a basic feature that took a lot of time and effort to reach its actual state, but let me be honest with you: why insist on using a 16x16px representation of a flag? In the early days of the internet there were technical reasons for this (bandwidth and screen resolution limitations), but nowadays, is this really the best option, especially in a world where people tend to use mobile phones?
I personally don’t care if there’s always an icon of a flag before the name of each country / ruling authority, but it would nice, when searching the catalogue or seeing the details of a coin, to see the historically correct flag associated to it. The ideal format and the ideal place to put it in the page is debatable but kind of indifferent to me; what I don’t understand is the point of maintaining manually edited 16x16px representations of flags, and maintaining a catalogue structure where the most recent flag of a country represents its whole past History.

For me, the ideal situation would be something like this: when you go to ‘Browse the catalogue by issuer’ page, you would see: 1) a list of existing/UN officially recognized countries/sections (Afghanistan, … , Zimbabwe) with no specific flags associated to then; 2) Down below, a list of ancient/historical/non-recognized/currently non-existing countries/sections (Aksum, …, Western Sahara) with no specific flags associated to then; 3) When selecting a particular section, it would open its subsections, i.e. the countrys' ruling authorities, each with its own defined period and flag. 4) When selecting a particular subsection, it would open its sub-subsections, i.e., a list of that ruling authority’s countries, autonomous regions, territories, dominions, etc.
This would greatly improve the browsing experience and more importantly, greatly improve the historical accuracy of a website that is used  worldwide as reference and knowledge base.