Talk:Ensign (flag)

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Removed "US Yacht Ensign"

File:Us ensign.png

United States Yacht Ensign was designed in 1848 at the request of the Secretary of the Navy to distinguish private yachts from commercial vessels and warships. It is flown in place of the national ensign (flag).

I removed this example image from the article, and replaced it with the red ensign (because that's a valid example of a special yacht/merchant ensign). The reason is that the so-called "US Yacht Ensign" does not exist. There used to be such an ensign, and it looked like this, but it never had any real legal standing as a national ensign, and it was abolished entirely in 1980.[1]

Many US vessels do in fact wear this flag as an ensign. In US waters, this is OK, because small pleasure boats don't need an ensign in US waters; so you could wear the Mickey Mouse flag if you wanted to. However, any documented vessel, or any vessel in international waters, must wear a legal ensign, which for US vessels is the Stars and Stripes.[2] (Don't get me started about the number of US yachts insulting the flag by flying it on the flag hoist as a courtesy or signal flag...)[3] — Johan the Ghost _seance 20:41, 16 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Proposed merger

I just don't think that naval ensign is a big enough subject in its own right to merit an article; it could easily be a sub-section of ensign. So, unless anyone has any ideas for a major expansion of naval ensign, I suggest merger. ~~Note that we don't have articles on "civil ensign" and "merchant ensign"~~. — Johan the Ghost _seance 17:09, 16 March 2006 (UTC)[reply]

In the meantime we have Civil ensign and I would suggest expanding the article naval ensign. There is a lot to show there, but I have to collect and check information on this topic first.

--Mevsfotw 23:24, 16 March 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Circular Reference

The State Ensign link on this page redirects back to this page. Not sure how to fix. 67.169.40.217 (talk) 03:24, 12 November 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks for pointing that out. I've removed the link, since there is no separate state ensign article. Alkari (?), 12 November 2014, 23:26 UTC

Sri Lanka

The naval ensign of Sri Lanka is in the table at about half the size of the others. I know how I'd fix that for a normal File transclusion; but the <gallery>...</gallery> layout, which apparently makes the bare lines into template calls, just incorporates additional parameters like width=800 or width11=800 into the caption. {{Gallery}} would probably work, but that would require changing all the lines into the rather more complex syntax. It would also complicate future edits of the gallery: inserting or deleting an image anywhere except the very last position would require changing all the positional numbers in params like

width4=200 [as in the second example in Template:Gallery/doc)
and (if used) alt3=The Finnish yacht club ensign includes a space for the club emblem

So... If somebody on this project knows how to fix the size problem, please be bold!

I'm putting a pointer to this Talk entry at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Heraldry and vexillology#"ensign" also needs some image work.

To discuss this, please {{Ping}} me. --Thnidu (talk) 00:33, 7 April 2015 (UTC)[reply]

@Thnidu: I think you've misunderstood the nature of this flag. It is a plain white flag with a canton (small upper-left quarter) showing the national flag. So the problem here is not the size, which is fine, but the fact that the perimeter is not sufficiently defined. The solution is probably to add a thin black border; and indeed, according to file on Commons, "It is easy to put a border around this image", simply by adding the word "border". Unfortunately, this doesn't seem to work within a gallery ... so back to you to find a technical fix. GrindtXX (talk) 00:59, 7 April 2015 (UTC)[reply]

@GrindtXX: Ah ha, thank you very much. I had already noticed that problem with several other ensigns that have a lot of white area at the border, but all the others on the page have at least one point of another color at each edge. ...(Sigh.) --Thnidu (talk) 22:14, 7 April 2015 (UTC)[reply]

@GrindtXX: FIXED! :-D I switched the gallery from HTML-style <gallery> to Template:Gallery, and that puts a thin grey border around every image. It wasn't as hard as I expected: a one-line Perl script made all the changes at once. I don't know how to change the border style within the template, if it's even possible, but it isn't essential. --Thnidu (talk) 22:42, 7 April 2015 (UTC)[reply]

@Thnidu: the image border style (1px solid #CCCCCC) is fixed in the Lua module that does the actual gallery-building, so making this property available for modification would involve coding changes. Perhaps an alternative version with more options could be created, but there’s no simple way to override its current behaviour AFAICT.—Odysseus 1479 00:03, 8 April 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks for the info, Odysseus1479. I'm not ready to learn another programming language. --Thnidu (talk) 02:41, 8 April 2015 (UTC)[reply]

A Commons file used on this page has been nominated for deletion

The following Wikimedia Commons file used on this page has been nominated for deletion:

Ensign of Vietnam People's Navy.svg

Participate in the deletion discussion at the nomination page. —Community Tech bot (talk) 05:13, 8 April 2019 (UTC)[reply]

usage symbols

§ National ensigns gives three vexillological "usage symbols" but doesn't explain their use:

civil ensign (usage symbol )
state ensign or government ensign (usage symbol )
naval ensign (usage symbol )

An explanation would be welcome. --Thnidu (talk) 18:04, 25 December 2020 (UTC)[reply]